Rainfall

7

THE NEXT DAY I got a page from Harry, who used a preset numeric code to tell me that he had uploaded something to a bulletin board we use. I figured it was Midori’s address, and Harry didn’t disappoint.

She lived in a small apartment complex called Harajuku Badento Haitsu — Harajuku Verdent Heights — in the shadow of the graceful arches of Tange Kenzo’s 1964 Tokyo Olympic Stadium. Cool Harajuku is the borderland that traverses the long silences and solemn cryptomeria trees of Yoyogi Park and its Meiji shrine; the frenetic, shopping-addled teen madness of Takeshita-dori; and the elegant boutiques and bistros of Omotesando.

Harry had confirmed that Midori did not have an automobile registered with the Tokyo Motor Vehicles Authority, which meant that she would rely on trains: either the JR, which she would pick up at Harajuku Station, or one of the subway lines, which she would access at Meijijingu-mae or Omotesando.

The problem was that the JR and subway stations were in opposite directions, and she was as likely to use one as the other. With no single chokepoint leading to both sets of stations, I had no basis for choosing either one. I would just have to find the best possible venue for waiting and watching and base my decision on that.

Omotesando-dori, where the subway stations were located, fit the bill. Known as the “Champs Elysées of Tokyo,” albeit mostly among people who have never been to Paris, Omotesando-dori is a long shopping boulevard lined with elm trees whose narrow leaves provide first a crown and then a carpet of yellow for a few days every autumn. Its many bistros and coffee shops were designed with Paris-style people-watching in mind, and I would be able to spend an hour or two watching the street from various establishments without attracting attention.

Even so, absent a lot of luck, I would have been in for a very boring few days of waiting and watching. But Harry had an innovation that saved me: a way of remotely turning a phone into a microphone.

The trick only works with digital phones with a speakerphone feature, where a line can be established even though the handset is in the cradle. The reception is muffled, but you can hear. Anticipating my next move, Harry had tested Midori’s line for me and had let me know that we were good to go.

At ten o’clock the following Saturday morning, I arrived at the Aoyama Blue Mountain coffee shop on Omotesando-dori, equipped with a small unit that would activate Midori’s phone and a cell phone for listening in on whatever I connected to. I took a seat at one of the small tables facing the street, where I ordered an espresso from a bored-looking waitress. Watching the meager morning crowds drift past, I flipped the switch on the unit and heard a slight hiss in the earpiece that told me the connection had been established. Other than that, there was silence. Nothing to do but wait.

A construction crew had set up a few meters down from the Blue Mountain’s entrance, where they were repairing potholes in the road. Four workers busied themselves mixing the gravel and measuring out the right amounts — about two more men than were needed, but the yakuza, the Japanese mob, works closely with the construction industry and insists that workers be provided with work. The government, pleased at this additional avenue of job creation, is complicit. Unemployment is kept at socially tolerable levels. The machine rolls on.

As vice minister at the Kokudokotsusho, Midori’s father would have been in charge of construction and most of the major public-works projects undertaken throughout Japan. He would have been hip deep in a lot of this. Not such a surprise that someone wanted him to come to an untimely end.

Two middle-aged men in black suits and ties, modern Japanese funeral attire, left the coffee shop, and the aroma of hot gravel wafted over to my table. The smell reminded me of my childhood in Japan, of the late summers when my mother would walk me to school for the first day of the new term. The roads always seemed to be in the process of being repaved at that time of year, and to me this kind of construction still smells like a portent of a fresh round of bullying and ostracism.

Sometimes I feel as though my life has been divided into segments. I would call these chapters, but the pieces are divided so abruptly that the whole lacks the kind of continuity that chapters would impart. The first segment ends when my father was killed, an event that shattered a world of predictability and security, replacing it with vulnerability and fear. There is another break when I receive the brief military telegram telling me that my mother has died, offering stateside leave for the funeral. Along with my mother I lost an emotional center of gravity, a faraway psychic governor on my behavior, and was left suffused with a new and awful sense of freedom. Cambodia was a further rupture, a deeper step into darkness.

Strangely, the time when my mother took me to the United States from our home in Japan does not represent a dividing line, then or now. I was an outsider in both places, and the move merely confirmed that status. Nor are any of my subsequent geographic ramblings particularly distinct. For a decade after Crazy Jake’s funeral I wandered the earth a mercenary, daring the gods to kill me but surviving because part of me was already dead.

I was fighting alongside Lebanese Christians in Beirut when the CIA recruited me to train the Mujahideen guerrillas battling the Soviets in Afghanistan. I was perfect: combat experience, and a mercenary history that made possible maximum governmental deniability.

For me, there has always been a war, and the time before feels unreal, dreamlike. War is the basis from which I approach everything else. War is all I really know. You know the Buddhist parable? “A monk awoke from a dream that he was a butterfly, then wondered whether he was a butterfly dreaming that he was a man.”

At a little after eleven, I heard sounds of movement within Midori’s apartment. Footsteps, then running water, which I took to be a shower. She worked at night, I realized; of course she would be a late riser. Then, shortly before noon, I heard a closing exterior door and the mechanical click of a lock, and I knew she was finally on the move.

I paid for the two espressos I had drunk and walked out onto Omotesando-dori, where I began to amble in the direction of JR Harajuku station. I wanted to get to the pedestrian overpass at Harajuku. This would give me a panoramic view, but it would also leave me exposed, so I wouldn’t be able to linger.

The timing was good. I only had to wait on the overpass for a minute before I caught sight of her. She was approaching from the direction of her apartment building and made a right onto Omotesando-dori when she reached it. It was easy for me to follow her from there.

Her hair was tied back in a ponytail, her dark eyes concealed by sunglasses. She was wearing snug black pants and a black V-necked sweater, and walked confidently, with purpose. I had to admit she looked good.

Enough of that, I told myself. How she looks has nothing to do with this.

She was carrying a shopping bag that I recognized from the distinctive maple color came from Mulberry, the English leather goods manufacturer. They had a store in Minami Aoyama, and I wondered if she was on her way to return something.

Midway to Aoyama-dori she turned into Paul Stuart. I could have followed her in, tried for our chance meeting there, but I was curious about where else she was going, and decided to wait. I set up in the Fouchet Gallery across the street, where I admired several paintings that afforded me a view of the street until she emerged, a Paul Stuart shopping bag in hand, twenty minutes later.

Her next stop was at Nicole Farhi London. This time I waited for her in the Aoyama Flower Market, on the ground floor of the La Mia building. From there, she continued onto a series of nameless Omotesando backstreets, periodically stopping to browse in one of the area’s boutiques, until she emerged onto Koto-dori, where she made a right. I followed her, staying back and on the opposite side of the street, until I saw her duck into Le Ciel Bleu.

I turned into the Tokyo J. M. Weston shop, admiring the handmade shoes in the windows at an angle that afforded me a view of Le Ciel Bleu. I considered. Her taste was mostly European, it seemed. She eschewed the large stores, even the upscale ones. She seemed to be completing a circle that would take her back in the direction of her apartment. And she was carrying that Mulberry bag.

If she was indeed on her way to return something, I had a chance to be there first. It was a risk because if I set up there and she went the other way, I would lose her. But if I could anticipate her and be waiting at her next stop before she got there, the encounter would seem more like chance and less like the result of being followed.

I left the Weston store and moved quickly up Koto-dori, window-shopping as I walked so that my face was turned away from Midori’s position. Once I was clear of Le Ciel Bleu, I cut across the street and ducked into Mulberry. I strolled over to the men’s section, where I told the proprietess that I was just looking, and began to examine some of the briefcases on display.

Five minutes later she entered the store as I had hoped, removing her sunglasses and acknowledging the welcoming irrashaimase of the proprietress with a slight bow of her head. Keeping her at the limits of my peripheral vision, I picked up one of the briefcases, as though examining its heft. From this angle, I felt her gaze stop on me and linger longer than would have been warranted by a casual glance around the store. I gave the briefcase a last once-over, then set it down on its shelf and looked up. She was still watching me, her head cocked slightly to the right.

I blinked once, as though in surprise, and approached her. “Kawamura-san,” I said in Japanese. “This is a nice surprise. I just saw you at Club Alfie last Friday. You were tremendous.”

She evaluated me silently for a long moment before responding, and I was glad my gamble had worked. I sensed that this intelligent woman would be cynical about coincidences, and might have suspected, had I come in after her, that she had been followed.

“Yes, I remember,” she said finally. “You’re the one who thinks jazz is like sex.” Before I could come up with a suitable response, she continued: “You didn’t have to say that, you know. You could try to be more forgiving.”

For the first time, I was in a position to notice her body. She was slender and long limbed, perhaps a legacy from her father, whose height had made him easy to follow down Dogenzaka. Her shoulders were broad, a lovely counterpart to a long and graceful neck. Her breasts were small, and, I couldn’t help but notice, shapely beneath her sweater. The skin on the exposed portion of her chest was beautiful: smooth and white, framed by the contrast of the black V-neck.

I looked into her dark eyes, and felt my usual urge to spar dissipate. “You’re right,” I told her. “I’m sorry.”

She closed her eyes briefly and shook her head. “You enjoyed the performance?”

“Immensely. I have your CD, and have been meaning to catch you and your trio for the longest time. I travel a lot, though, and this was my first chance.”

“Where do you travel?”

“Mostly America and Europe. I’m a consultant,” I said in a tone indicating that my work would be a boring topic for me. “Nothing as exciting as being a jazz pianist.”

She smiled. “You think being a jazz pianist is exciting?”

She had a natural interrogator’s habit of reflecting back the last thing the other party had said, encouraging the speaker to share more. It doesn’t work with me. “Well, let me put it this way,” I said. “I can’t remember someone ever suggesting to me that consulting is like sex.”

She threw back her head and laughed then, not bothering to cover her open mouth with her hand in the typical Japanese woman’s unnecessarily dainty gesture, and again I was struck by the unusual confidence with which she carried herself.

“That’s good,” she said after a moment, folding her arms across her chest and conceding a small, lingering smile.

I smiled back. “What’s today? A bit of shopping?”

“A bit. And you?”

“The same. It’s past time for a new briefcase. We consultants have to maintain appearances, you know.” I glanced down at the shopping bag she was carrying. “I see you’re a fan of Paul Stuart. That was going to be my next stop.”

“It’s a good store. I know it from New York, and was glad when they opened a Tokyo branch.”

I raised my eyebrows slightly. “Have you spent much time in New York?”

“Some,” she said with a faint smile, looking into my eyes.

Damn, she’s tough, I thought. Challenge her. “How’s your English?” I asked, switching from Japanese.

“I get by,” she said, without missing a beat.

“You want to get a cup of cawfee?” I asked, staying with English and using my best Brooklyn accent.

She smiled again. “That’s pretty authentic.”

“So is the suggestion.”

“I thought you were going to Paul Stuart.”

“I was. But now I’m thirsty. Do you know the Tsuta coffeehouse? It’s great. And right around the corner, just off Koto-dori.”

Her arms were still folded across her chest. “I don’t know it.”

“Then you’ve got to try it. Koyama-san serves the best coffee in Tokyo, and you can drink it listening to Bach or Chopin, looking out onto a wonderful secret garden.”

“A secret garden?” she asked, playing for time, I knew. “What’s the secret?”

I gave her a sober look. “Koyama-san says that if I tell you, I have to kill you. So it would be better if you were to see for yourself.”

She laughed again, cornered but seeming not to mind. “I think I’d have to know your name first,” she said.

“Fujiwara Junichi,” I replied, bowing automatically. Fujiwara was my father’s last name.

She returned the bow. “It’s nice to meet you, Fujiwara-san.”

“Let me introduce you to Tsuta,” I said, smiling, and we headed off.

The stroll over to Tsuta took less than five minutes, during which we made small talk about how the city had changed over the years, how we missed the days when the boulevard in front of Yoyogi Park was closed to automobile traffic on Sundays and host to a delirious outdoor party of costumed revelers, when the identity of Japanese jazz was being newly forged in a thousand basement bars and coffeehouses, when there was no gleaming new City Hall in Shinjuku and the area was alive with real yearning and romance and grit. I enjoyed talking with her, and knew at some level that this was strange, even undesirable.

We were in luck, and one of Tsuta’s two tables, each of which overlooks the establishment’s secret garden through a single oversized picture window, was open and waiting for us. Alone, I typically enjoy a seat at the counter, where a view of Koyama-san’s reverential coffee preparations is always a wonder, but today I wanted an atmosphere more conducive to conversation. We each ordered the house demitasse, made with an intense dark roast, and sat at right angles to each other, so that we could both see the garden.

“How long have you lived in Tokyo?” I asked, when we were settled in.

“On and off for my whole life, really,” she said, slowly stirring a spoonful of sugar crystals into her demitasse. “I lived abroad for a few years when I was little, but mostly I grew up in Chiba, one town over. I used to come to Tokyo all the time when I was a teenager, to try to sneak into the live houses and listen to jazz. Then I spent four years in New York, studying at Julliard. After that, I came back to Tokyo. And you?”

“Same as you — off and on for my whole life.”

“And where did you learn to order coffee in an authentic New York accent?”

I took a sip of the bitter liquid before me and considered how to answer. It’s rare for me to share biographical details. The things I have done, and continue to do, have marked me, just as Crazy Jake said they would, and, even if the mark is invisible to most of the wider world, I am always aware of its presence. Intimacy is no longer familiar to me. Probably, I sometimes realize with a measure of regret, it is no longer possible.

I haven’t had a real relationship in Japan since my move into the shadows. There were some faltering dates, perfunctory on my part. Tatsu, and some other friends that I no longer see, sometimes tried to set me up with women they knew. But where were these relationships going to go, when the two subjects that most define me were unmentionable, taboo? Imagine the conversation: “I served in Vietnam.” “How did you manage that?” “I’m half American, you see, a mongrel.”

There are a few women from the mizu shobai, the water trade, as Japan calls its demimonde, whom I see from time to time. We’ve known each other long enough so that things are no longer conducted on a straight cash basis, expensive gifts instead providing the necessary currency and context, and there is even a certain degree of mutual affection. They all assume that I’m married, an assumption that makes it easy for me to explain the subtle security measures in which I engage as a matter of course. And the assumption also renders explainable the suspended, on-again, off-again nature of our relationship, and my reticence about personal details.

But Midori had a reticence about her, too, a reticence she had just breached in telling me a bit about her childhood. I knew that if I failed to reciprocate, I would learn nothing more from her.

“I grew up in both countries,” I said after a long pause. “I never lived in New York, but I’ve spent some time there, and I know some of the region’s accents.”

Her eyes widened. “You grew up in Japan and the States?”

“Yes.”

“How did you come to do that?”

“My mother was American.”

I was aware of a slight intensification of her gaze, as she searched for the first time for the Caucasian in my features. You can still spot it, if you know what you’re looking for.

“You don’t look very . . . I mean, I think you must have inherited mostly your father’s features.”

“That bothers some people.”

“What does?”

“That I look Japanese, but I’m really something else.”

I remembered for a moment the first time I heard the word ainoko, half-breed. It happened at school, and I asked my father about it that night. He scowled and said only, “Taishita koto nai.” It’s nothing. But pretty soon I got to hear the word while the ijimekko, the school bullies, were busy trying to beat the shit out of me, and I put two and two together.

She smiled. “I don’t know about other people. For me, the intersection of cultures is where things get most interesting.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. Look at jazz. Roots in black America, branches in Japan and all over the world.”

“You’re unusual. Japanese are typically racist.” I realized that my tone was more bitter than I had intended.

“I don’t know that the country is so racist. It’s just been insular for so long, and we’re always afraid of what’s new or unknown.”

Ordinarily I find such idealism in the face of all contrary facts irritating, but I recognized that Midori was simply projecting her own good sentiment onto everyone around her. Looking into her dark, earnest eyes, I couldn’t help smiling. She smiled back, her full lips parting and lighting up her eyes, and I had to look away.

“What was it like to grow up that way, in two countries, two cultures?” she asked. “It must have been incredible.”

“Pretty standard, really,” I said, reflexively.

She paused, her demitasse halfway to her lips. “I don’t see how something like that could really be ‘standard.’ ”

Careful, John. “No. It was difficult, actually. I had a hard time fitting in either place.”

The demitasse continued upward, and she took a sip. “Where did you spend more time?”

“I lived in Japan until I was about ten, then mostly in the States after that. I came back here in the early eighties.”

“To be with your parents?”

I shook my head. “No. They were already gone.”

My tone rendered unambiguous the word gone, and she nodded in sympathy. “Were you very young?”

“Early teens,” I said, averaging things out, still trying to keep it vague when I could.

“That’s terrible, to lose both parents so young. Were you close with them?”

Close? Although my face bore the stamp of his Asian features, and although he married an American, I believe my father had a typically outsized Japanese focus on race. The bullying I received in school both enraged and ashamed him.

“Fairly close, I suppose. They’ve been gone a long time.”

“Do you think you’ll go back to America?”

“I did at one point,” I said, remembering how I’d gotten drawn into the work it now seemed like I’d been doing forever. “After returning as an adult, I spent ten years here always thinking I would stay just one more and then go back. Now I don’t really dwell on it.”

“Does Japan feel like home to you?”

I remembered what Crazy Jake told me, just before I did what he asked of me. There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done.

“It’s become my home, I guess,” I said after a long time. “What about you? Would you want to live in America again?”

She was gently tapping on her demitasse, her fingers rippling up its sides from pinky to forefinger, and I thought, She plays her moods. What would my hands do if I could do that?

“I really loved New York,” she said after a moment, smiling at some memory, “and I’d like to go back eventually, even to stay for a while. My manager thinks that the band isn’t too far off. We’ve got a gig at the Vanguard in November; that’ll really put us on the map.”

The Village Vanguard, the Manhattan mecca of live jazz. “The Vanguard?” I said, impressed. “That’s quite a pedigree. Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, the whole pantheon.”

“It’s a big opportunity,” she said, nodding.

“You could leverage that, make New York your base, if you wanted to.”

“We’ll see. Don’t forget, I’ve lived in New York before. It’s a great place, maybe the most exciting place I’ve ever been. But it’s like swimming underwater, you know? At first you feel as though you could go along forever, seeing everything from this new perspective, but eventually you have to come up for air. After four years, it was time for me to come home.”

That was the opening. “You must have had indulgent parents, if they were willing to send you abroad for that long.”

She smiled faintly. “My mother died when I was young — same as you. My father sent me to Julliard. He loved jazz and was thrilled that I wanted to be a jazz pianist.”

“Mama told me you lost him recently,” I said, hearing a flat echo of the words in my ears. “I’m sorry.” She bowed her head in acknowledgment of my expression of sympathy, and I asked, “What did he do?”

“He was a bureaucrat.” This is an honorable profession in Japan, and the Japanese word kanryo lacks the negative connotations of its English counterpart.

“With what ministry?”

“For most of his career, the Kensetsusho.” The construction ministry.

We were making some progress. I noticed that the manipulation was making me uncomfortable. Finish the interview, I thought. Then get the hell out. She puts you off your game; this is dangerous.

“Construction must have been a stuffy place for a jazz enthusiast,” I said.

“It was hard for him at times,” she acknowledged, and suddenly I sensed guardedness. Her posture hadn’t changed, her expression was the same, but somehow I knew she had been ready to say more and then had thought better of it. If I had touched a nerve, she had barely shown it. She wouldn’t have expected me to notice.

I nodded, I hoped reassuringly. “I know a little bit about being uncomfortable in your environment. At least your father’s daughter doesn’t have any problems like that — doing gigs at Alfie makes a lot of sense for a jazz pianist.”

I felt the odd tension for a second longer, then she laughed softly as though she had decided to let something go. I wasn’t sure what I had brushed up against, and would consider it later.

“So, four years in New York,” I said. “That’s a long time. You must have had a very different perspective when you returned.”

“I did. The person who returns from living abroad isn’t the same person who left originally.”

“How do you mean?”

“Your outlook changes. You don’t take things for granted that you used to. For instance, I noticed in New York that when one cab cut off another, the driver who got cut off would always yell at the other driver and do this” — she did a perfect imitation of a New York cabbie flipping someone the bird — “and I realized this was because Americans assume that the other person intended to do what he did, so they want to teach the person a lesson. But you know, in Japan, people almost never get upset in those situations. Japanese look at other people’s mistakes more as something arbitrary, like the weather, I think, not so much as something to get angry about. I hadn’t thought about that before I lived in New York.”

“I’ve noticed that difference, too. I like the Japanese way better. It’s something to aspire to.”

“But which are you? Japanese or American? The outlook, I mean,” she added quickly, I knew for fear of insulting me by being too direct.

I looked at her, thinking for an instant of her father. I thought of other people I’ve worked with, and how much different my life might have been if I’d never known them. “I’m not sure,” I said, finally, glancing away. “As you seem to have noticed at Alfie, I’m not a very forgiving person.”

She paused. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” I responded, not knowing what was coming.

“What did you mean, when you said we had ‘rescued’ you?”

“Just trying to strike up a conversation,” I said. It sounded flip, and I saw immediately from her eyes that it was the wrong response.

You have to show her a little bit, I thought again, not sure whether I was compromising or rationalizing. I sighed. “I was talking about things I’ve done, things I knew, or thought I knew, were right,” I said, switching to English, which was more comfortable for me on this subject. “But then later it turned out they weren’t. At times those things haunt me.”

“Haunt you?” she asked, not understanding.

“Borei no yo ni.” Like a ghost.

“My music made the ghosts go away?”

I nodded and smiled, but the smile turned sad. “It did. I’ll have to listen to it more often.”

“Because they’ll come back?”

Jesus, John, get off this. “It’s more like they’re always there. Sugita koto wa, sugita koto da.” The past is the past.

“You have regrets?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

“Probably. But are yours like everyone else’s?”

“That I wouldn’t know. I don’t usually compare.”

“But you just did.”

I chuckled. “You’re tough” was all I could say.

She shook her head. “I don’t mean to be.”

“I think you do. But you wear it well.”

“What about the saying ‘I only regret the things I haven’t done’?”

I shook my head. “That’s someone else’s saying. Someone who must have spent a lot of time at home.”

I knew I would learn nothing more about her father or the stranger today without questions that would betray my true intention in asking them. It was time to start winding things down.

“Any more shopping today?” I asked.

“I was going to, but I’ve got someone to meet in Jinbocho in less than an hour.”

“A friend?” I asked, professionally curious.

She smiled. “My manager.”

I paid the bill and walked back to Aoyama-dori. The crowds had thinned, and the air felt cold and heavy. The temperature had dropped in the two and a half weeks since I had taken out Kawamura. I looked up and saw unbroken clouds.

I had enjoyed myself much more than I had expected — more, really, than I had wanted. But the chill cut through my reverie, reviving my memories and doubts. I glanced over at Midori’s face, thinking, What have I done to her? What am I doing?

“What is it?” she asked, seeing my eyes.

“Nothing. Just tired.”

She looked to her right, then again at me. “It felt as though you were looking at someone else.”

I shook my head. “It’s just us.”

We walked, our footsteps echoing softly. Then she asked, “Will you come see me play again?”

“I’d like that.” Stupid thing to say. But I didn’t have to follow through on it.

“I’m at the Blue Note Friday and Saturday.”

“I know,” I said, stupid again, and she smiled.

She flagged down a cab. I held the door for her as she went in, an annoying part of me wondering what it would be like to be getting in with her. As it pulled away from the curb, she rolled down the window and said, “Come alone.”

8

THE NEXT FRIDAY I received another page from Harry telling me to check our bulletin board.

What he had found out was that the stranger on the train was indeed a reporter: Franklin Bulfinch, the Tokyo bureau chief for Forbes magazine. Bulfinch was one of only five male foreigners living in the Daikanyama apartment complex I had seen the stranger enter; all Harry had needed to do was cross-reference the names he found in the local ward directory against the main files kept by the Immigration Bureau. The latter kept information on all foreign residents in Japan, including age, birthplace, address, employer, fingerprints, and a photograph. Using this information, Harry had been able to quickly determine that the other foreigners failed to match the description I had provided. He had also obligingly hacked and uploaded Bulfinch’s photo so I could confirm that we were talking about the same guy. We were.

Harry had recommended a look at forbes.com, where Bulfinch’s articles were archived. I checked the site, and spent several hours reading Bulfinch’s accounts of suspected alliances between the government and the yakuza, about how the Liberal Democratic Party uses threats, bribery, and intimidation to control the press, about the cost of all this corruption to the average Japanese.

Bulfinch’s English-language articles had little impact in Japan, and the local media were obviously not following up on his efforts. I imagined this would be frustrating for him. On the other hand, it was probably the reason I hadn’t been tasked with removing him.

My guess was that Kawamura was one of Bulfinch’s sources, hence the reporter’s presence on the train that morning and his quick search of Kawamura. I felt some abstract admiration for his doggedness: his source is having a heart attack right in front of him, and all he does is search the guy’s pockets for a deliverable.

Someone must have found out about the connection, figured it was too risky to take out a foreign bureau chief, and decided to just plug the leak instead. It had to look natural, or they would have provided more grist for Bulfinch’s mill. So they called me.

All right, then. There had been no B-team. I had been wrong about Benny. I could let this one go.

I looked at my watch. It was not quite 5:00. If I wanted to, I could easily get to the Blue Note by 7:00, when the first set would begin.

I liked her music and I liked her company. She was attractive, and, I sensed, attracted to me. Enticing combination.

Just go, I thought. It’ll be fun. Who knows what’ll happen afterward? Could be a good night. The chemistry is there. Just a one-nighter. Could be good.

But that was all bullshit. I couldn’t say what would happen after her performance, but Midori didn’t feel like a one-nighter. That was exactly why I wanted to see her, and exactly why I couldn’t.

What’s wrong with you? I thought. You need to call one of your acquaintances. Maybe Keiko-chan, she’s usually good for a few laughs. A late dinner, maybe that little Italian place in Hibiya, some wine, a hotel.

For the moment, though, the prospect of a night with Keiko-chan was oddly depressing. Maybe a workout instead. I decided to head over to the Kodokan, one of the places where I practice judo.

The Kodokan, or “School for Studying the Way,” was founded in 1882 by Kano Jigoro, the inventor of modern judo. A student of various schools of swordsmanship and hand-to-hand combat, Kano distilled a new system of fighting based on the principle of maximum efficiency in the application of physical and mental energy. Loosely speaking, judo is to Western wrestling what karate is to boxing. It is a system not of punches and kicks, but of throws and grappling, distinguished by an arsenal of brutal joint locks and deadly strangling techniques, all of which must of course be employed with great care in the practice hall. Judo literally means “the way of gentleness” or “the way of giving in.” I wonder what Kano would make of my interpretation.

Today the Kodokan is housed in a surprisingly modern and bland eight-story building in Bunkyo-ku, southwest of Ueno Park and just a few kilometers from my neighborhood. I took the subway to Kasuga, the nearest station, changed in one of the locker rooms, then climbed the stairs to the daidojo, the main practice room, where the Tokyo University team was visiting. After I threw my first uke easily and made him tap out with a strangle, they all lined up to do battle with the seasoned warrior. They were young and tough but no match for old age and treachery; after about a half hour of nonstop randori I was still consistently coming out on top, especially when it went to groundwork.

A couple of times, as I returned to the hajime position after a throw, I noticed a Japanese kurobi, or black belt, stretching out in the corner of the tatami mats. His belt was tattered and more gray than black, which indicated that he’d been wearing it for a lot of years. It was hard to guess his age. His hair was full and black, but his face had the sort of lines that I associate with the passage of time and a certain amount of experience. His movements were certainly young; he was holding splits without apparent difficulty. Several times I sensed that he was intently aware of me, although I never actually saw him looking in my direction.

I needed a break and made my apologies to the college students who were lined up, still waiting to test their mettle against me. It felt good to beat judoka half my age, and I wondered how much longer I’d be able to do it.

I went over to the side of the mat and, while I was stretching, watched the guy with the tattered belt. He was practicing his harai-goshi entries with one of the college students, a stocky kid with a crew cut. His entry was so powerful that I caught the college kid wincing a couple of times as their torsos collided.

He finished and thanked the kid, then walked over to where I was stretching and bowed. “Will you join me for a round of randori?” he asked, in lightly accented English.

I looked up and noted an intense pair of eyes and strongly set jaw, neither of which his smile did anything to soften. I was right about his watching me, even if I hadn’t caught him. Did he spot the Caucasian in my features? Maybe he did, and just wanted to take the gaijin test — although, in my experience, that was a game for judoka younger than he looked to be. And his English, or at least his pronunciation, was excellent. That was also odd. The Japanese who are most eager to pit themselves against foreigners have usually had the least experience with them, and their English will typically reflect that lack of contact.

“Kochira koso onegai shimasu,” I replied. My pleasure. I was annoyed that he had addressed me in English, and I stayed with Japanese. “Nihongo wa dekimasu ka?” Do you speak Japanese?

“Ei, mochiron. Nihonjin desu kara,” he responded, indignantly. Of course I do. I’m Japanese.

“Kore wa shitsuri: shimasita. Watashi mo desu. Desu ga, hatsuon ga amari migoto datta no de . . .” Forgive me. So am I. But your accent was so perfect that . . .

He laughed. “And so is yours. I expect your judo to be no less so.” But by continuing to address me in English, he avoided having to concede the truth of his compliment.

I was still annoyed, and also wary. I speak Japanese as a native, as well as I speak English, so trying to compliment me on my facility with either language is inherently insulting. And I wanted to know why he would assume that I spoke English.

We found an empty spot on the tatami and bowed to each other, then began circling, each of us working for an advantageous grip. He was extremely relaxed and light on his feet. I feinted with deashi-barai, a foot sweep, intending to follow with osoto-gari, but he countered the feint with a sweep of his own and slammed me down to the mat.

Damn, he was fast. I rolled to my feet and we took up our positions again, this time circling the other way. His nostrils were flaring slightly with his breathing, but that was the only indication he gave of having exerted himself.

I had a solid grip on his right sleeve with my left hand, my fingers wrapped deeply into the cloth. A nice setup for ippon seonagi. But he’d be expecting that. Instead, I swept in hard for sasae-tsurikomi-goshi, spinning inside his grip and tensing for the throw. But he’d anticipated the move, popping his hips free before I’d cut off the opening and blocking my escape with his right leg. I was off balance and he hit me hard with taiotoshi, powering me over his outstretched leg and drilling me into the mat.

He threw me twice more in the next five minutes. It was like fighting a waterfall.

I was getting tired. I faced him and said, “Jaa, tsugi o saigo ni shimasho ka?” Shall we make this the last one?

“Ei, so shimasho,” he said, bouncing on his toes. Let’s do it.

Okay, you bastard, I thought. I’ve got a little surprise for you. Let’s see how you like it.

Juji-gatame, which means “cross-lock,” is an arm-bar that gets its name from the angle of its attack. Its classical execution leaves the attacker perpendicular to his opponent, with both players lying on their backs, forming the shape of a cross. One permutation — classicists would say mutation — is called flying juji-gatame, in which the attacker launches the lock directly from a standing position. Because it requires total commitment and fails as often as it succeeds, this variation is rarely attempted, and is not particularly well known.

If this guy wasn’t familiar with it, he was about to receive an introduction.

I circled defensively, breathing hard, trying to look more tired than I was. Three times I shook off the grip he attempted and dodged around him as though I was reluctant to engage. Finally he got frustrated and took the bait, reaching a little too deeply with his left hand for my right lapel. As soon as he had the grip, I caught his arm and flung my head backward, launching my legs upward as though I were a diver doing a gainer. My head landed between his feet, my weight jerking him into a semicrouch, with my right foot jammed into his left armpit, destroying his balance. For a split second, before he went sailing over me, I saw complete surprise on his face. Then we were on the mat and I had trapped his arm, forcing it back against the elbow.

He somersaulted over onto his back and tried to twist away from me, but he couldn’t get free. His arm was straightened to the limit of its natural movement. I applied a fraction more pressure but he refused to submit. I knew that we had about two more millimeters before his elbow hyperextended. Four more and his arm would break.

“Maita ka,” I said, bending my head forward to look at him. Submit. He was grimacing in pain but he ignored me.

It’s stupid to fight a solid armlock. Even in Olympic competition, judoka will submit rather than face a broken arm. This was getting dangerous.

“Maita ka,” I said again, more sharply. But he kept struggling.

Another five seconds went by. I wasn’t going to let him go without a submission, but I didn’t want to break his arm. I wondered how long we could maintain our position.

Finally he tapped my leg with his free hand, the judoka’s way of surrender. I released my grip instantly and pushed away from him. He rolled over and then kneeled in classic seiza posture, his back erect and his left arm held stiffly in front of him. He rubbed his elbow for several seconds and regarded me.

“Subarashikatta,” he said. “Excellent. I would request a rematch, but I don’t think my arm will allow that today.”

“You should have tapped out earlier,” I said. “There’s no point resisting an armlock. Better to survive to fight another day.”

He bowed his head in acknowledgment. “My foolish pride, I suppose.”

“I don’t like to tap out, either. But you won the first four rounds. I’d trade your record for mine.” He was still using English; I was responding in Japanese.

I faced him in seiza, and we bowed. When we stood up he said, “Thank you for the lesson. I’ve never seen that variation of juji-gatame executed successfully in randori. Next time I’ll know not to underestimate the risks you’re willing to take to gain a submission.”

I already knew that. “Where do you practice?” I asked him. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

“I practice with a private club,” he said. “Perhaps you might join us sometime. We’re always in search of judoka of shibumi.” Shibumi is a Japanese aesthetic concept. It’s a kind of subtle power, an effortless authority. In the narrower, intellectual sense, it might be called wisdom.

“I’m not sure I’d be what you’re looking for. Where is your club?”

“In Tokyo,” he said. “I doubt that you would have heard of it. My . . . club is not generally open to foreigners.” He recovered quickly. “But, of course, you are Japanese.”

Probably I should have let it go. “Yes. But you approached me in English.”

He paused. “Your features are primarily Japanese, if I may say so. I thought I detected some trace of Caucasian, and wanted to satisfy myself. I am usually very sensitive to such things. If I had been wrong, you simply wouldn’t have understood me, and that would have been that.”

Reconnaissance by fire, I thought. You shoot into the treeline; if someone shoots back, you know they’re there. “You find satisfaction in that?” I asked, consciously controlling my annoyance.

For a moment, I thought he looked oddly uncomfortable. Then he said, “Would you mind if I were to speak frankly?”

“Have you not been?”

He smiled. “You are Japanese, but American also, yes?”

My expression was carefully neutral.

“Regardless, I think you can understand me. I know Americans admire frankness. It’s one of their disagreeable characteristics, made doubly so because they congratulate themselves for it ceaselessly. And this disagreeable trait is now infecting even me! Do you see the threat America poses to Nippon?”

I regarded him, wondering if he was a crackpot rightist. You run into them from time to time — they profess to abhor America but they can’t help being fascinated with it. “Americans are . . . causing too many frank conversations?” I asked.

“I know you are being facetious, but in a sense, yes. Americans are missionaries, like the Christians who came to Kyushu to convert us five hundred years ago. Only now, they proselytize not Christianity, but the American Way, which is America’s official secular religion. Frankness is only one, relatively trivial, aspect.”

Why not have some fun. “You feel that you’re being converted?”

“Of course. Americans believe in two things: first, despite everyday experience and common sense, that ‘all men are created equal’; and second, that complete trust in the market is the best way for a society to order its affairs. America has always needed such transcendental notions to bind together its citizens, who have come from different cultures all over the world. And Americans are then driven to prove the universality of these ideas, and so their validity, by aggressively converting other cultures to them. In a religious context, this behavior would be recognized as missionary in its origins and effect.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” I allowed. “But an aggressive outlook toward other cultures has never been an American monopoly. How do you explain the Japanese colonial history in Korea and China? Attempts to save Asia from the tyranny of Western market forces?”

He smiled. “You are being facetious again, but your explanation is not so far from the truth. Because market forces — competition — are what drove the Japanese into their own imperial conquests. The Western nations had already taken their concessions in China — America had institutionalized the plunder of Asia with the ‘Open Door.’ What choice had we but to take our own concessions, lest the West encircle us and gain a chokehold on our supplies of raw materials?”

“Tell me the truth,” I said, fascinated despite myself. “Do you really believe all this? That the Japanese never wanted war, that the West caused it all? Because the Japanese launched their first campaigns against Korea under Hideyoshi, over four hundred years ago. How did the West cause that?”

He faced me directly and leaned forward, his thumbs hooked into his obi, his toes taking his weight. “You are missing my larger point. Japanese conquest in the first half of this century was a reaction to Western aggression. In earlier times there were other causes, even such base ones as the lust for power and plunder. War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human, ne? But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that.”

He leaned closer. “War has always been with the world and always will be. But an intellectual Crusades? Fought on a global scale, backed by modern industrial economies, with the threat of a nuclear auto-da-fé for the unbelievers? Only America offers this.”

Well, that confirmed the crackpot-rightist diagnosis. “I appreciate your speaking frankly with me,” I said, bowing slightly. “Ii benkyo ni narimashita.” It’s been an education.

He returned my bow and started backing away. “Kochira koso.” The same here. He smiled, again with some seeming discomfort. “Perhaps we will meet again.”

I watched him leave. Then I walked over to one of the regulars, an old-timer named Yamaishi, and asked if he’d ever seen the guy who was walking off the tatami. “Shiranai,” he said with a shrug. “Amari shiranai kao da. Da kedo, sugoku tsuyoku na. Randori, mita yo.” I don’t know him. But his judo is very strong. I saw your fight.

I wanted to cool off before showering, so I went down to an empty dojo on the fifth floor. I left the fluorescent lights off when I went in. This room was best when it was lit only by Korakuen Amusement Park, which twinkled and hummed next door. I bowed to the picture of Kano Jigoro on the far wall, then did ukemi rolls until I reached the center of the room. Standing in the quiet darkness, I looked out over Korakuen. Just barely, I could hear the roller coaster ratcheting slowly up to its apogee, then suspended silence, then the whoosh of its downward plunge and the screaming laughter of its passengers, the wind whipping away their cries.

I stretched in the center of the room, the judogi uniform wet against my skin. I came to the Kodokan because it’s the premiere spot to study judo, but, like my neighborhood in Sengoku, the place has become much more to me than it was at first. I’ve seen things here: a grizzled old veteran who has been doing judo every day for half a century, patiently showing a child in an oversized gi that the proper placement of the hooking leg in sankakujime is at a slight angle to, not straight behind, one’s opponent; a young sandan, third-degree black belt, who left his native Iran to practice at the Kodokan four years ago, hardly missing a day of practice since, drilling his osoto-gari in such precise and powerful repetitions that his movements come to resemble some vast natural force, the movement of tides, perhaps, the dancer becoming the dance; a college kid quietly crying after being choked out in a match, the crowd cheering for his victorious opponent and taking no heed of his dignified tears.

The roller coaster was making its familiar ratcheting sound, the last of the light fading from the sky above it. It was past seven, too late for me to get to the Blue Note. Just as well.

9

I HAD NO special plans the next day, so I decided to stop at an antiquarian bookstore I like in Jinbocho, a part of the city best known for its warren of densely packed bookshops, some specializing in Eastern fare, others in Western. The shop’s proprietor had alerted me via pager a few days earlier that he had located and was holding for me an old tome on shimewaza — strangles — that I had been trying to find for a long while, to add to my modest collection on bugei, the warrior arts.

I picked up the Mita subway line at Sengoku Station. Sometimes I use the subway; other times I take the JR from Sugamo. It’s good to be random. Today there was a priest in Shinto garb collecting donations outside the station. It seemed like these guys were everywhere lately, not just in front of parliament anymore. I took the train in the direction of Onarimon and got off at Jinbocho. I meant to leave the station at the exit nearest the Isseido Bookstore, but, distracted by thoughts of Midori and Kawamura, I wound up taking the wrong corridor. After turning a corner and then coming to a sign for the Hanzoman line, I realized my error, turned, and rounded the corner again.

A pudgy Japanese was moving quickly down the corridor, about ten meters away. I flashed his eyes as he approached but he ignored me, looking straight ahead. He was wearing a pinstriped suit and a striped shirt. Must have heard somewhere that stripes make you look taller.

I glanced down and saw why I hadn’t heard him coming: cheap shoes with rubber soles. But he was carrying an expensive-looking black attaché case, a lid-over model, maybe an old Swain Adeney. A businessman who knew good attachés but assumed no one would notice his shoes? Maybe. But this wasn’t really the place for business — Kasumigaseki or Akasaka would be more likely. I knew the shoes would make for comfortable attire on a long walk — if following someone were part of the likely itinerary, for example.

Aside from the attaché, his hands were empty, but I tensed anyway as we passed each other. Something about him bothered me. I slowed down a little as we passed each other, looked back over my shoulder, marked the way he walked. Faces are easy to disguise, clothes you can change in a minute, but not too many people can conceal their gait. It’s something I look for. I watched this guy’s walk — short stride, bit of an exaggerated, self-important arm swing, slight side-to-side swaying action of the head — until he turned the corner.

I cut back the other way, checking behind me before I left the station. Probably it was nothing, but I’d remember his face and gait, watch my back as always, see if he showed up again.

Principles of Strangles was in excellent condition, as promised, with a price to match, but I knew that I would greatly enjoy the slim volume. Although I was eager to depart, I waited patiently while the proprietor carefully, almost ceremoniously, wrapped the book in heavy brown paper and string. He knew it wasn’t a gift, but this was his way of showing his appreciation for the sale and it would have been rude for me to hurry him. Finally, he proffered the package with extended arms and a deep bow, and I accepted it from a similar posture, bowing again as I left.

I headed back to the Mita line. If I had really been concerned that someone was tailing me I would have caught a cab, but I wanted to see if I could spot Attaché Man again. I waited on the platform while two trains pulled in and departed. Anyone trying to follow me would have had to stay on the platform, also — incongruous behavior that makes a person stand out in sharp relief. But the platform was deserted, and Attaché Man was gone. Probably it had been nothing.

I thought of Midori again. It was her second night at the Blue Note, and she’d be starting her first set in about an hour. I wondered what she would think when I didn’t show for the second time. She was human; she would probably assume that I hadn’t been interested, that maybe she had been a little too forward in inviting me. It was unlikely that I would ever see her again, or if we did by chance bump into each other, it would be slightly awkward but polite, two people who met and started an acquaintanceship that somehow didn’t take off, certainly nothing out of the ordinary. She might ask Mama about me at some point, but all Mama knows is that I pop into Alfie from time to time without warning.

I wondered what it would have been like if we’d met under other circumstances. It could have been good, I thought again.

I almost laughed at the absurdity. There was no room for anything like that in my life, and I knew it.

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

That was about the truest advice I’d ever been given. Forget about her, I thought. You know you have to.

My pager buzzed. I found a pay phone and dialed the number.

It was Benny. After the usual exchange of bona fides, he said, “There’s another job for you, if you want it.”

“Why are you contacting me this way?” I asked, meaning why not the bulletin board.

“Time-sensitive matter. You interested?”

“I’m not known for turning away work.”

“You’d have to bend one of your rules on this one. If you do, there’s a bonus.”

“I’m listening.”

“We’re talking about a woman. Jazz musician.”

Long pause.

“You there?” he said.

“Still listening.”

“You want the details, you know where to find them.”

“What’s the name?”

“Not over the phone.”

Another pause.

He cleared his throat. “All right. Same name as a recent job. Related matter. Is that important?”

“Not really.”

“You want this?”

“Probably not.”

“Significant bonus if you want it.”

“What’s significant?”

“You know where to find the details.”

“I’ll take a look.”

“I need an answer within forty-eight hours, okay? This needs to be taken care of.”

“Don’t they all,” I said, and hung up.

I stood there for a moment afterwards, looking around the station, watching people bustling back and forth.

Fucking Benny, telling me, “This needs to be taken care of,” letting me know that someone else would be doing it if I didn’t.

Why Midori? A connection with Bulfinch, the reporter. He had sought her out, I saw that at Alfie, along with Telephone Man. So whoever Telephone Man worked for would assume that Midori had learned something she wasn’t supposed to, or maybe that her father had given her something, something Bulfinch was after. Something not worth taking any chances over.

You could do it, I thought. If you don’t, someone else will. You’d at least do it right, do it fast. She wouldn’t feel anything.

But they were just words. I wanted to feel that way but couldn’t. What I felt like instead was that her world should never have collided with mine.

A Mita-sen train pulled in, heading in the direction of Otemachi, the transfer point to Omotesando and the Blue Note. An omen, I thought, and got on it.

10

IF YOU WANT to survive as long as I have in the world I inhabit, you’ve got to think like the opposition. I learned that from the gangs that pursued me when I was a kid, and refined the lesson with SOG in Cambodia. You’ve got to ask: If I were trying to get at me, how would I go about it?

Predictability is the key, geographical and chronological. You need to know where a person will be and at what time. You learn this by surveillance, analyzing the routes to work, the times the target comes and goes, until you’ve identified a pattern, and choke points through which the target can almost always be counted on to pass at a certain time. You choose the most vulnerable of these, and that’s where you lay the ambush.

And if that’s what you’re doing, you’d better not forget that all the time someone is running the same kind of operation on you. Thinking like this is what divides the hard targets from the soft ones.

The same principle works for crime prevention. If you wanted to grab some quick cash, where would you wait? Near an ATM, probably, and probably at night. You’d scout around for the right location, too, someplace with enough pedestrian traffic to save you a long wait, but not so much of a crowd that you’d be impeded from acting when you identified a good target. You’d look for a dark spot far enough from the machine so the target wouldn’t notice you, but close enough so that you could move right in once the cash transaction was completed. Police stations close by would make you nervous, and you’d probably hunt for a better place. Etc. If you think this way, you’ll know exactly where to look to spot someone lurking, and you’ll know where you’re vulnerable, where more alertness is required.

With Midori, extensive surveillance wasn’t even necessary. Her schedule was publicly available. Presumably that was how Bulfinch knew to find her at Alfie. And that would be the easiest way for Benny’s people to find her now.

From Otemachi I rode the Chiyoda-sen subway seven stops to Omotesando, where I exited and took the stairs to the street. I walked the short distance to the Yahoo Café, a coffee shop with Internet terminals. I went in, paid the fee, and logged on to one of the terminals. With the café’s T1 line, it took just a few seconds to access the file Benny had posted. It included a few scanned publicity photos, Midori’s home address, a concert schedule with tonight’s appearance at the Blue Note, and parameters indicating that the job had to look natural. They were offering the yen equivalent of about $150,000 — a substantial premium over our usual arrangement.

The reference to tonight’s appearance at the Blue Note, first set at 7:00, was ominous. Predictability, time and place. If they wanted to take her out soon, tonight would be almost too good to pass up. On the other hand, Benny had told me I had forty-eight hours to get back to him, which would indicate that she would be safe for at least that long.

But even if she had that much time, I didn’t see how I could parlay it into a reasonable life span. Warn her that someone had just put a contract out on her? I could try, but she had no reason to believe me. And even if she did, what then? Teach her how to improve her personal security? Sell her on the benefits of an anonymous life in the shadows?

Ludicrous. There was really only one thing I could do. Use the forty-eight hours to figure out why Benny’s people had decided Midori was a liability and to eliminate the reasons behind that view.

I could have walked the kilometer or so to the Blue Note, but I wanted to do a drive-by first. I caught a cab and told the driver to take me down Koto-dori, then left to the Blue Note. I was counting on traffic to make the ride slow enough so that I could do a quick sneak-and-peek at some of the spots where I would wait if I were setting up surveillance outside.

Traffic was heavy as I had hoped, and I had a good chance to scope the area as we crawled past. In fact, the Blue Note isn’t that easy a place to wait around unobtrusively. It’s surrounded mostly by stores that were now closed. The Caffe Idee restaurant across the street, with its outdoor balcony, would offer a clear-enough view, but the Idee has a long, narrow external staircase that would afford access sufficiently slow as to make the restaurant an unacceptable place to wait.

On the other hand, you wouldn’t have to linger long. You can time the end of a Blue Note set to within about five minutes. The second set hadn’t yet begun, so if anyone was planning on visiting Midori after the show tonight, they probably hadn’t even arrived yet.

Or they could already be inside, just another appreciative audience member.

I had the cab stop before reaching Omotesando-dori, then got out and walked the four blocks back to the Blue Note. I was careful to scope the likely places, but things looked clear.

There was already a long line waiting for the second set. I walked up to the ticket window, where I was told that the second set was sold out unless I had a reservation.

Damn, I hadn’t thought about that. But Midori would have, if she really had wanted me to come. “I’m a friend of Kawamura Midori’s,” I said. “Fujiwara Junichi . . . ?”

“Of course,” the clerk responded immediately. “Kawamura-san told me you might be coming tonight. Please wait here — the second set will start in fifteen minutes, and we want to make certain that you have a good seat.”

I nodded and stepped off to the side. As promised, the crowd from the first set started filing out five minutes later, and as soon as they were clear I was taken inside, down a wide, steep staircase, and shown to a table right in front of the still-empty stage.

No one would ever confuse the Blue Note with Alfie. First, the Blue Note has a high ceiling that conveys a feeling of spaciousness totally unlike Alfie’s almost cave-like intimacy. Also, the whole feel is higher-end: good carpeting, expensive-looking wood paneling, even some flat panel monitors in an antechamber for obsessive-compulsives who need to check their e-mail between sets. And the crowd is different at the Blue Note, too: first, because you can’t even fit a crowd into Alfie, and second, because the people at Alfie are there only for the music, whereas, at the Blue Note, people also come to be seen.

I looked around the room as the second-set crowd flowed in, but nothing set off my radar.

If you wanted to get to her, and you had a choice of seats, where would you go? You’d stay close to one of the entrances to this floor. That would give you an escape route, if you needed one, and it would keep the entire room in front of you, so you could watch everyone else from behind, instead of the reverse.

I swiveled and looked behind me as though searching for an acquaintance. There was a Japanese man, mid-forties, sitting all the way in the left rear, near one of the exits. The people sitting next to him were all talking to one another; he was obviously alone. He was wearing a rumpled suit, dark blue or gray, which fit him like an afterthought. His expression was bland, too bland for my taste. This was a crowd composed of enthusiasts, sitting in twos and threes, waiting eagerly for the performance. Mr. Bland felt like he was deliberately trying to be unobtrusive. I filed him as a strong possible.

I swiveled in the other direction. Same seat, right rear. Three young women who looked like office ladies on a night out. No apparent problem there.

Mr. Bland would be able to watch me throughout the performance, and I needed to avoid the mistake of conspicuous aloneness that he had made. I told the people around me that I was a friend of Midori’s and was here at her invitation; they started asking me questions, and pretty soon we were shooting the shit like old friends.

A waitress came by and I ordered a twelve-year-old Cragganmore. The people around me all followed suit. I was a friend of Kawamura Midori’s, so whatever I had ordered, it must be cool. They probably didn’t know whether they had just ordered scotch, vodka, or a new kind of beer.

When Midori and her trio walked down the side of the room, everyone started clapping. Another thing about Alfie: There, when the musicians first appear, the room fills with reverential silence.

Midori took her place at the piano. She was wearing faded blue jeans and a black velvet blouse, low cut and clinging, her skin dazzling white next to it. She tilted her head forward and touched her fingers to the keys, and the audience grew silent, expectant. She spent a long moment frozen that way, staring at the piano, and then began.

She started slowly, with a coy rendering of Thelonious Monk’s “Brilliant Corners,” but overall she played harder than she had at Alfie, with more abandon, her notes sometimes struggling with the bass and the drums, but finding a harmony in the opposition. Her riffs were angry and she rode them longer, and when she came back the notes were sweet but you could still sense a frustration, a pacing beneath the surface.

The set lasted for ninety minutes, and the music alternated between a smoky, melodic sound, then elegiac sadness, then a giddy, laughing exuberance that shook the sadness away. Midori finished in a mad, exhilarated riff, and when it was over the applause was unrestrained. Midori stood to acknowledge it, bowing her head. The drummer and bass guitarist were laughing and wiping dripping sweat from their faces with handkerchiefs, and the applause went on and on. What Midori felt when she played, the place her music took her, she had taken the audience there, and the clapping was filled with real gratitude. When it finally faded, Midori and her trio left the stage, and people started to get up and move about.

A few minutes later she reappeared and squeezed in next to me. Her face was still flushed from the performance. “I thought I saw you here,” she said, giving me a mild check with her shoulder. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank you for inviting me. They were expecting me at the ticket window.”

She smiled. “If I hadn’t told them, you wouldn’t have gotten in, and you can’t hear the music very well from the street, can you?”

“No, the reception is certainly better from where I’m sitting,” I said, looking around as though taking in the grandeur of the Blue Note, but in fact scoping for Mr. Bland.

“Do you want to get something to eat?” she asked. “I’m going to grab something with the band.”

I hesitated. I wasn’t going to have a chance to probe for information with other people around, and I wasn’t eager to broaden my always-small circle of acquaintances.

“Hey, this is your big night, your first gig at the Blue Note,” I said. “You probably want to just enjoy it yourselves.”

“No, no,” she said, giving me another shoulder check. “I’d like you to come. And don’t you want to meet the rest of the band? They were great tonight, weren’t they?”

On the other hand, depending on how the evening progressed, you might have a chance to talk to her alone a bit later. “They really were. The audience loved you.”

“We were thinking the Living Bar. Do you know it?”

Good choice, I thought. The Living Bar is an atmospheric place in Omotesando, absurdly named as only the Japanese can name them. It was close by, but we’d have to turn at least five corners to walk there, which would allow me to check our backs and see if Mr. Bland was following.

“Sure. It’s a chain, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but the one in Omotesando is nicer than all the others. They serve lots of interesting little dishes, and the bar is good, too. Good selection of single malts. Mama says you’re a connoisseur.”

“Mama flatters me,” I said, thinking that if I weren’t careful, Mama would put together a damn dossier and start handing it out. “Let me just pay for the drinks.”

She smiled. “They’re already paid for. Let’s go.”

“You paid for me?”

“I told the manager that the person sitting front center was my special guest.” She switched to English: “So everything is on the house, ne?” She smiled, pleased at the chance to use the idiom.

“Okay, then,” I said. “Thank you.”

“Can you wait for just a few minutes? I’ve got a few things to take care of backstage first.”

Getting to her backstage would be too difficult to bother trying. If they were going to make a move, they’d make it outside. “Sure,” I said, getting up and shifting so that my back was to the stage and I could see the room. Too many people were now up and milling about, though, and I couldn’t spot Mr. Bland. “Where do you want to meet?”

“Right here — five minutes.” She turned and walked backstage.

Fifteen minutes later she reappeared through a curtain at the back of the stage. She had changed into a black turtleneck, silk or a fine cashmere, and black slacks. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, her face perfectly framed.

“Sorry to make you wait. I wanted to change — a performance is hard work.”

“No problem,” I said, taking her in. “You look great.”

She smiled. “Let’s go! The band is out front. I’m starving.”

We headed out the front entrance, passing a number of lingering fans who thanked her on the way. If you wanted to get to her and could time it right, I thought, you would wait at the bottom of the stairs of the Caffe Idee, where you would have a view of both the front and side entrances. Sure enough, Mr. Bland was there, strolling away from us with studied nonchalance.

So much for Benny’s forty-eight hours, I thought. It was probably just his version of “Act now — offer expires at midnight.” Something he picked up in a sales course somewhere.

The bass guitarist and drummer were waiting for us, and we strolled over. “Tomo-chan, Ko-chan, this is Fujiwara Junichi, the gentleman I mentioned,” Midori said, gesturing to me.

“Hajimemashite,” I said, bowing. “Konya no enso wa saiko ni subarashikatta.” It’s good to meet you. Tonight’s performance was a great pleasure.

“Hey, let’s use English tonight,” Midori said, switching over as she did so. “Fujiwara-san, these guys both spent years in New York. They can order a cab in Brooklyn as well as you can.”

“In that case, please call me John,” I said. I extended my hand to the drummer.

“You can call me Tom,” he said, shaking my hand and bowing simultaneously. He had an open, almost quizzical expression, and was dressed unpretentiously in jeans, a white oxford-cloth shirt, and a blue blazer. There was something sincere in the way he had combined his Western and Japanese greetings, and I found I liked him immediately.

“I remember you from Alfie,” the bassist said, extending his hand carefully. He was dressed predictably in black jeans, turtleneck, and blazer, the sideburns and rectangular glasses all trying a bit too hard for The Look.

“And I remember you,” I said, taking his hand and consciously injecting some warmth into my grip. “You were all wonderful. Mama told me before the performance that you were all going to be stars, and I can see that she was right.”

Maybe he knew I was soft-soaping him, but he must have felt too good after the performance to care. Or his personality was different in English. Either way, he gave me a small but genuine-looking smile and said, “Thank you for mentioning that. Call me Ken.”

“And call me Midori,” Midori cut in. “Now let’s go, before I starve!”

During the ten-minute walk to Za Ribingu Baa, as the locals called it, we all chatted about jazz and how we had discovered it for ourselves. Although I was ten years older than the oldest of them, philosophically we were all purists of the Charlie Parker/Bill Evans/Miles Davis school, and conversation was easy enough.

Periodically I was able to glance behind us as we turned corners. On several of these occasions I spotted Mr. Bland in tow. I didn’t expect him to move while Midori was with all these people, if that’s what he had in mind.

Unless they were desperate, of course, in which case they would take chances, maybe even move sloppily. My ears were intensely focused on the sounds behind us as we walked.

The Living Bar announced its existence in the basement of the Scène Akira building with a discreet sign over the stairs. We walked down and into the entranceway, where we were greeted by a young Japanese man with a stylish brush cut and a well-tailored navy suit with three of its four buttons fastened. Midori, very much the leader of the group, told him we wanted a table for four; he answered “ Kashikomarimashita” in the most polite Japanese and murmured into a small microphone next to the register. By the time he had escorted us inside, a table had been prepared and a waitress was waiting to seat us.

The crowd wasn’t too dense for a Saturday night. Several groups of glamorous-looking women were sitting in high-backed chairs at the black varnished tables, wearing expertly applied makeup and Chanel like it was made for them, their cheekbones in sharp relief in the subdued glow of the overhead incandescent illumination, their hair catching the light. Midori put them to shame.

I wanted the seat facing the entrance, but Tom moved too quickly and took it himself. I was left facing the bar.

As we ordered drinks and enough small appetizers to make for a reasonable meal, I saw the man who had escorted us inside walk Mr. Bland over to the bar. Mr. Bland sat with his back to us, but there was a mirror behind the bar, and I knew he had a good view of the room.

While we waited for our order to arrive, we continued our safe, comfortable conversation about jazz. Several times I considered the merits of removing Mr. Bland. He was part of a numerically superior enemy. If an opportunity presented itself to reduce that number by one, I would take it. If I did it right, his employers would never know of my involvement, and taking him out could buy me more time to get Midori out of this.

At some point, after much of the food had been consumed and we, along with Mr. Bland, were on our second round of drinks, one of them asked me what I did for a living.

“I’m a consultant,” I told them. “I advise foreign companies on how to bring their goods and services into the Japanese market.”

“That’s good,” Tom said. “It’s too hard for foreigners to do business in Japan. Even today, liberalization is just cosmetic. In many ways it’s the same Japan as during the Tokugawa bakufu, closed to the outside world.”

“Yes, but that’s good for John’s business,” Ken added. “Isn’t it, John? Because, if Japan didn’t have so many stupid regulations, if the ministries that inspect incoming food and products weren’t so corrupt, you would need to find a different job, ne?”

“C’mon, Ken,” Midori said. “We know how cynical you are. You don’t have to prove it.”

I wondered if Ken might have had too much to drink.

“You used to be cynical, too,” he went on. He turned to me. “When Midori came back from Julliard in New York, she was a radical. She wanted to change everything about Japan. But I guess not anymore.”

“I still want to change things,” Midori said, her voice warm but firm. “It’s just that I don’t think a lot of angry slogans will make any difference. You have to be patient, you have to pick your battles.”

“Which ones have you picked lately?” he asked.

Tom turned to me. “You have to understand, Ken feels like he sold out by doing gigs at established places like the Blue Note. Sometimes he takes it out on us.”

Ken laughed. “We all sold out.”

Midori rolled her eyes. “C’mon, Ken, give it a rest.”

Ken looked at me. “What about you, John? What’s the American expression: ‘Either you’re a part of the solution, or you’re a part of the problem’?”

I smiled. “There’s a third part, actually: ‘Or you’re a part of the landscape.’ ”

Ken nodded as though internally confirming something. “That’s the worst of all.”

I shrugged. He didn’t matter to me, and it was easy to stay disengaged. “The truth is, I hadn’t really thought of what I do in these terms. Some people have a problem exporting to Japan, I help them out. But you make some good points. I’ll think about what you’re saying.”

He wanted to argue and didn’t know what to do with my agreeable responses, which was fine. “Let’s have another drink,” he said.

“I think I’ve reached my limit,” Midori said. “I’m ready to call it a night.”

As she spoke I noticed Mr. Bland, who was studiously looking elsewhere, clicking a small device about the size of a disposable lighter that he was resting on one knee and pointing in our direction. Fuck, I thought. A camera.

He’d been taking Midori’s picture, and I would be in the shots. This was the kind of risk I’d be taking if I stayed close to her now.

Okay. I’d have to leave with the three of them, then invent an excuse, maybe that I left something, double back to the bar and catch him as he was leaving to follow Midori again. I wasn’t going to let him keep that camera, not with my pictures on the film in it.

But Mr. Bland gave me another option, instead. He got up and started walking in the direction of the rest room.

“I’m going to head home, too,” I said, standing up, feeling my heart beginning to beat harder in my chest. “Just need to hit the rest room first.” I eased away from the table.

I followed a few meters behind Mr. Bland as he maneuvered along the polished black floor. I kept my head down somewhat, avoiding eye contact with the patrons I was passing, hearing my heart thudding steadily in my ears. He opened the rest-room door and went inside. Before the door had quite swung closed, I opened it and followed him in.

Two stalls, two urinals. I could see in my peripheral vision that the stall doors were open a crack. We were alone. The thudding of my heart was loud enough to block out sound. I could feel the air flowing cleanly in and out of my nostrils, the blood pumping through the veins of my arms.

He turned to face me as I approached, perhaps recognizing me from his peripheral vision as one of the people who was with Midori, perhaps warned by some vestigial and now futile instinct that he was in danger. My eyes were centered on his upper torso, not focusing on any one part of him, taking in his whole body, the position of his hips and hands, absorbing the information, processing it.

Without pausing or in any way breaking my stride I stepped in and blasted my left hand directly into his throat, catching his trachea in the V created by my thumb and index finger. His head snapped forward and his hands flew to his throat.

I stepped behind him and slipped my hands into his front pockets. From the left I retrieved the camera. The other was empty.

He was clawing ineffectually at his damaged throat, silent except for some clicking from his tongue and teeth. He started to stamp his left foot on the ground and contort his torso in what I recognized as the beginning of panic, the body moving of its own primitive accord to get air, air, through the broken trachea and into the convulsing lungs.

I knew it would take about thirty seconds for him to asphyxiate. No time for that. I took hold of his hair and chin in a sentry removal hold and broke his neck with a hard clockwise twist.

He collapsed backward into me and I dragged him into one of the empty stalls, sitting him on the toilet and adjusting his position so that the body would stay put. With the door closed, anyone coming in to use the bathroom would see his legs and just think the stall was occupied. With luck, the body wouldn’t be discovered until closing time, long after we were gone.

I eased the door shut with my right hip and used my knee to close the latch. Then, gripping the upper edge of the stall divider, I pulled myself up and slid over to the stall on the other side. I pulled a length of toilet paper from the dispenser and used it to wipe the two spots that I had touched. I jammed the toilet paper in a pants pocket, took a deep breath, and walked back out into the bar.

“All set?” I asked, walking up to the table, controlling my breathing.

“Let’s go,” Midori said. The three of them stood up, and we headed toward the cashier and the exit.

Tom was holding the bill, but I took it from him gently and insisted that they all let me pay; it was my privilege after the pleasure of their performance. I didn’t want to take a chance on anyone trying to use a credit card and leaving a record of our presence here tonight.

As I was paying, Tom said, “I’ll be right back,” and headed toward the rest room.

“Me, too,” Ken added, and followed him.

I imagined vaguely that the body could slide off the toilet while they were in there. Or that Murphy’s Law would make an appearance in some other way. The thoughts weren’t unduly troubling. There was nothing I could do but relax and wait until they had returned.

“You want a walk home?” I asked Midori. She had mentioned during the evening that she lived in Harajuku, although of course I already knew that.

She smiled. “That would be nice.”

Three minutes later, Tom and Ken returned. I saw them laughing about something as they approached us, and knew that Mr. Bland had gone undiscovered.

We stepped outside and walked up the steps into the cool Omotesando evening.

“My car’s at the Blue Note,” Ken said when we were outside. He looked at Midori. “Anyone need a ride?”

Midori shook her head. “No, I’m fine. Thanks.”

“I’ll take the subway,” I told him. “But thanks.”

“I’ll go with you,” Tom said, diffusing the slight tension I could feel brewing as Ken did the math. “John, it was nice meeting you tonight. Thank you again for coming, and for the dinner and drinks.”

I bowed. “My pleasure, really. I hope I’ll have another opportunity.”

Ken nodded. “Sure,” he said, with a demonstrable lack of enthusiasm. Tom took a step backward, his cue to Ken, I knew, and we said good night.

Midori and I strolled slowly in the direction of Omotesando-dori. “Was that okay?” she asked when Tom and Ken were out of earshot.

“I had a good time,” I told her. “They’re interesting people.”

“Ken can be difficult.”

I shrugged. “He was a little jealous that you had invited someone else to tag along, that’s all.”

“He’s just young. Thanks for handling him gently tonight.”

“No problem.”

“You know, I don’t usually invite people I’ve only just met to come to a performance, or to go out afterwards.”

“Well, we’d met once before, so your guideline should be intact.”

She laughed. “You feel like another single malt?”

I looked at her, trying to read her. “Always,” I said. “And I’ve got a place I think you’ll like.”

I took her to Bar Satoh, a tiny second-story establishment nestled in a series of alleys that extend like a spider’s web within the right angle formed by Omotesando-dori and Meiji-dori. The route we took gave me several opportunities to check behind us, and I saw that we were clean. Mr. Bland had been alone.

We took the elevator to the second floor of the building, then stepped through a door surrounded by a riot of gardenias and other flowers that Satoh-san’s wife tends with reverence. A right turn, a step up, and there was Satoh-san, presiding over the solid cherry bar in the low light, dressed immaculately as always in a bow tie and vest.

“Ah, Fujiwara-san,” he said in his soft baritone, smiling a broad smile and bowing as he caught sight of us. “Irrashaimase.” Welcome.

“Satoh-san, it’s good to see you,” I said in Japanese. I looked around, noting that his small establishment was almost full. “Is there a possibility that we could be seated?”

“Ei, mochiron,” he replied. Yes, of course. Apologizing in formal Japanese, he had the six patrons at the bar all shift to their right, freeing up an additional seat at the far end and creating room for Midori and me.

Thanking Satoh-san and apologizing to the other patrons, we made our way to our seats. Midori’s head was moving back and forth as she took in the décor: bottle after bottle of different whiskeys, many obscure and ancient, not just behind the bar but adorning shelves and furniture throughout the room, as well. Eclectic Americana like an old Schwinn bicycle suspended from the back wall, an ancient black rotary telephone that must have weighed ten pounds, a framed photograph of President Kennedy. As a complement to his whiskey-only policy, Satoh-san plays nothing but jazz, and the sounds of singer/poet Kurt Elling issued warm and wry from the Marantz vacuum-tube stereo in the back of the bar, accompanied by the low murmur of conversation and muffled laughter.

“I . . . love this place!” Midori whispered to me in English as we sat down.

“It’s great, isn’t it?” I said, pleased that she appreciated it. “Satoh-san is a former sarariman who got out of the rat race. He loves whiskey and jazz, and saved every yen he could until he was able to open this place ten years ago. I think it’s the best bar in Japan.”

Satoh-san strolled over, and I introduced Midori. “Ah, of course!” he exclaimed in Japanese. He reached under the bar, shuffling things around until he found what he was looking for: a copy of Midori’s CD. Midori had to beg him not to play it.

“What do you recommend tonight?” I asked him. Satoh-san makes four pilgrimages a year to Scotland and has introduced me to malts that are available almost nowhere else in Japan.

“How many drinks?” he asked. If the answer were several, he would conduct a tasting, starting with something light from the Lowlands and progressing to the iodine tang of the Islay malts.

“Just one, I think,” I responded. I glanced at Midori, who nodded her head.

“Subtle? Strong?”

I glanced at Midori again, who said, “Strong.”

Satoh-san smiled. “Strong” was clearly the answer that he was hoping for, and I knew he had something special in mind. He turned and took a clear glass bottle from in front of the mirror behind the bar, then held it before us. “This is a forty-year-old Ardbeg,” he explained. “From the south shore of Islay. Very rare. I keep it in a plain bottle because anyone who recognized it might try to steal it.”

He took out two immaculate tumblers and placed them before us. “Straight?” he asked, not knowing Midori’s preferences.

“Hai,” she answered, to Satoh-san’s relieved nod of approval. He carefully poured off two measures of the bronze liquid and recorked the bottle.

“What makes this malt special is the balance of flavors — flavors that would ordinarily compete with or override one another,” he told us, his voice low and slightly grave. “There is peat, smoke, perfume, sherry, and the salt smell of the sea. It took forty years for this malt to realize the potential of its own character, just like a person. Please, enjoy.” He bowed and moved to the other end of the bar.

“I’m almost afraid to drink it,” Midori said, smiling and raising the glass before her, watching the light turn the liquid to amber.

“Satoh-san always provides a brief lecture on what you’re about to experience. It’s one of the best things about this place. He’s a student of single malts.”

“Jaa, kanpai,” she said, and we touched glasses and drank. She paused for a moment afterward, then said, “Wow, that is good. Like a caress.”

“Like what your music sounds like.”

She smiled and gave me one of her shoulder checks. “I enjoyed our conversation the other day at Tsuta,” she said. “I’d like to hear more about your experiences growing up in two worlds.”

“I’m not sure how interesting a story that is.”

“Tell it to me, and I’ll tell you if it’s interesting.”

She was much more a listener than a talker, which would make my job of collecting operational intelligence more difficult. Let’s just see where this goes, I thought.

“Home for me was a little town in upstate New York. My mother took me there after my father died so she could be close to her parents,” I said.

“Did you spend any time in Japan after that?”

“Some. During my junior year in high school, my father’s parents wrote to me about a new U.S./Japan high-school exchange program that would allow me to spend a semester at a Japanese high school. I was actually pretty homesick at the time and enrolled right away. So ultimately, I got to spend a semester at Saitama Gakuen.”

“Just one semester? Your mother must have wanted you back.”

“Part of her did. I think another part of her was relieved to have some time to focus on her own career. I was pretty wild at that age.” This seemed an appropriate euphemism for constant fights and other discipline problems at school.

“How was the semester?”

I shrugged. Some of these memories were not particularly pleasant. “You know what it’s like for returnees. It’s bad enough if you’re just an ordinary Japanese kid with an accent that’s been Americanized by time abroad. If you’re half-American on top of it, you’re practically a freak.”

I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes that made me feel I was worsening a betrayal. “I know what it’s like to be a returnee child,” she said. “And you had envisioned the semester as a homecoming. You must have felt so alienated.”

I waved my hand as though it was nothing. “It’s all in the past.”

“Anyway, after high school?”

“After high school was Vietnam.”

“You were in Vietnam? You look young for that.”

I smiled. “I was a teenager when I joined the army, and when I got there the war was already well under way.” I was aware that I was sharing more personal details than I should have. I didn’t care.

“How long were you over there?”

“Three years.”

“I thought that back then getting drafted meant only one year.”

“It did. I wasn’t drafted.”

Her eyes widened. “You volunteered?”

It had been ages since I had talked about any of this, or even thought about it. “I know it sounds a little strange from this distance. But yes, I volunteered. I wanted to prove that I was American to the people who doubted it because of my eyes, my skin. And then, when I was over there, in a war against Asians, I had to prove it even more, so I stayed. I took dangerous assignments. I did some crazy things.”

We were quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Can I ask, are those the things that you said ‘haunt’ you?”

“Some of them,” I said evenly. But this would go no further. She may have had guidelines about inviting strangers to performances, but my rules regarding these matters are stricter still. We were getting close to places that even I can look at only obliquely.

Her fingers were resting lightly on the sides of her glass, and without thinking I reached out and took them into my hands, raised them before my face. “I bet I could tell from your hands that you play the piano,” I said. “Your fingers are slender, but they look strong.”

She twisted her hands around, so that now she was holding mine. “You can tell a lot from a person’s hands,” she said. “In mine you see the piano. In yours I see bushido. But on the joints, not the knuckles . . . what do you do, judo? Aikido?”

Bushido means the martial ways, the way of the warrior. She was talking about the calluses on the first and second joints of all my fingers, the result of years of gripping and twisting the heavy cotton judogi. She was holding my hands in a businesslike way, as though to examine them, but there was a gentleness in her touch and I felt electricity running all the way up my arms.

I withdrew my hands, afraid of what else she might read in them. “These days just judo. Grappling, throwing, strangles — it’s the most practical martial art. And the Kodokan is the best place in the world for judo.”

“I know the Kodokan. I studied aikido at a little dojo in Ochanomizu, one stop away on the Chuo line.”

“What’s a jazz pianist doing studying aikido?”

“It was before I got really serious about the piano, and I don’t practice anymore because it’s too hard on the hands. I did it because I got bullied in school for a while — my father once had a tour in the States. I told you I know what it’s like to be a returnee.”

“Did the aikido help?”

“Not at first. It took me awhile to get good. But the bullies gave me incentive to keep practicing. One day, one of them grabbed my arm, and I threw her with san-kyo. After that, they left me alone. Which was good, because san-kyo was actually the only throw I knew well enough to do.”

I looked at her, imagining what it would be like to be on the san-kyo receiving end of the determination that was taking her to increasing renown, maybe to fame, in jazz circles.

She lifted her glass with the fingers of both hands, and I noticed an economy of movement to the simple act. It was graceful, pleasant to watch.

“You do sado,” I said, almost thinking out loud. Sado is the Japanese tea ceremony. Its practitioners strive through the practice of refined, ritualized movements in the preparation and serving of tea to achieve wabi and sabi: a sort of effortless elegance in thought and movement, a paring down to the essentials to more elegantly represent a larger, more important concept that would otherwise be obscured.

“Not since I was a teenager,” she answered, “and even then never well. I’m surprised that you can see it. Maybe if I have another drink it will disappear.”

“No, I wouldn’t want that,” I said, fighting the feeling of being drawn into those dark eyes. “I like the sado.”

She smiled. “What else do you like?”

Where is she going? “I don’t know. Lots of things. I like watching you play.”

“Tell me.”

I sipped the Ardbeg, peat and smoke meandering across my tongue and throat. “I like the way you start calm, and build on it. I like the way you start playing the music, and then how, when you get going, it’s as though the music is playing you. How you get caught up in it. Because when I feel that happening to you, I get caught up in it also. It pulls me outside myself. I can tell how alive it makes you feel, and it makes me feel that way, too.”

“What else?”

I laughed. “What else? That’s not enough?”

“Not if there’s more.”

I rolled the glass back and forth between my hands, watching the reflections of light inside.

“I always feel like you’re looking for something while you’re playing but that you can’t find it. So you look harder, but it still eludes you, and the melody starts to get really edgy, but then you hit this point where it’s as though you realize that you’re not going to find it, you just can’t, and then the edginess is gone and the music turns sad, but it’s a beautiful sadness, a wise, accepting sadness.”

I realized again that there was something about her that made me open up too much, reveal too much. I needed to control it.

“It means a lot to me that you recognize that in my music,” she said after a moment. “Because it’s something that I’m trying to express. Do you know mono no aware?”

“I think so. ‘The pathos of things,’ right?”

“That’s the usual translation. I like ‘the sadness of being human.’ ”

I was surprised to find myself moved by the idea. “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said quietly.

“I remember once, when I was living in Chiba, I took a walk on a winter night. It was warm for winter, and I took off my jacket and sat in the playground of the school where I had gone as a little girl, all by myself, and watched the silhouettes of the tree branches against the sky. I had such a strong awareness that one day, I was going to be gone, but the trees would still be here, the moon would still be above them, shining down, and it made me cry, but a good kind of crying, because I knew it had to be that way. I had to accept it because that’s the way things are. Things end. That’s mono no aware.”

Things end. “Yes, it is,” I said, thinking of her father.

We were quiet for a moment. Then I asked, “What did Ken mean when he said that you were a radical?”

She took a sip of her Ardbeg. “He’s a romantic. I was hardly a radical. Just rebellious.”

“Rebellious how?”

“Look around you, John. Japan is incredibly screwed up. The LDP, the bureaucrats, they’re bleeding the country dry.”

“There are problems,” I allowed.

“Problems? The economy’s going to hell, families can’t pay their property taxes, there’s no confidence in the banking system, and all the government can think to do to solve the problem is deficit spending and public works. And you know why? Payoffs to the construction industry. The whole country is covered in concrete, there’s nowhere else to build, so the politicians vote for office parks that no one uses, bridges and roads that no one drives on, rivers lined with concrete. You know those ugly concrete ‘tetrapods’ that line the Japanese coast, supposedly protecting it from erosion? All the studies show those monstrosities speed erosion; they don’t forestall it. So we’re destroying our own ecosystem to keep the politicians fat and the construction industry rich. Is that what you call just ‘problems’?”

“Hey, maybe Ken was right,” I said, smiling. “You are pretty radical.”

She shook her head. “This is just common sense. Tell me the truth, really. Don’t you sometimes feel like you’re being screwed by the status quo and all the people who profit from it? And doesn’t that piss you off?”

“Sometimes, yes,” I said, carefully.

“Well, it pisses me off a lot. That’s all Ken meant.”

“Forgive me for saying so, but wasn’t your father a part of that status quo?”

A long pause. “We had our differences.”

“That must have been hard.”

“It was, sometimes. For a long time we were pretty alienated.”

I nodded. “Were you ever able to mend fences?”

She laughed softly, but without mirth. “My father found out he had lung cancer just a few months before he died. The diagnosis made him reassess his life, but that didn’t give us long to work things out.”

The information caught me by surprise. “He had lung cancer? But . . . Mama mentioned a heart attack.”

“He had a heart condition, but always smoked anyway. All his government cronies did, and he felt he needed to do it to fit in. He was so much a part of the system, in a way, he gave his life for it.”

I took a sip of the smoky liquid and swallowed. “Lung cancer is a terrible way to go,” I said. “At least, the way he died, he didn’t suffer.” The sentiment was weirdly heartfelt.

“That’s true, and I’m grateful for it.”

“Forgive me if I’m prying, but what do you mean when you say the diagnosis made him reassess his life?”

She was looking past me, her eyes unfocused. “In the end, he realized that he had spent his life being part of the problem, as Ken would say. He decided he wanted to be part of the solution.”

“Did he have time to do that?”

“I don’t think so. But he told me he wanted to do something, wanted to do something right, before he died. The main thing was that he felt that way.”

“How do you know he didn’t have time?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes coming back to me.

“Your father — he’s diagnosed, suddenly face-to-face with his own mortality. He wants to do something to atone for the past. Could he have? In such a short time?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said, and instantly I knew I had bumped up against that defensive wall again.

“I’m thinking about what we talked about the other day. About regret. If there’s something you regret, but you’ve only got a short time to do something about it, what do you do?”

“I imagine that would be different for everyone, depending on the nature of your regrets.”

C’mon, Midori. Work with me. “What would your father have done? Was there anything that could have reversed the things he came to regret?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

But you do know, I thought. A reporter he was meeting with contacted you. You know, but you’re not telling me.

“What I mean is, maybe he was trying to do something to be part of the solution, even if you couldn’t see it. Maybe he talked to his colleagues, told them about his change of heart, tried to get them to change theirs. Who knows?”

She was quiet, and I thought, That’s it, that’s as far as you can possibly push it, she’s going to get suspicious and clam up on you now for sure.

But after a moment she said, “Are you asking because of a regret of your own?”

I looked at her, simultaneously disturbed by the truth of her question and relieved at the cover it afforded me. “I’m not sure,” I said.

“Why don’t you just tell me?”

I felt like I’d been hit with an aikido throw. “No,” I said, my voice low.

“Am I that hard to talk to?” she asked, her voice gentle.

“No,” I said, smiling into her dark eyes. “You’re easy. That’s the problem.”

She sighed. “You’re a strange man, John. You’re so obviously uncomfortable talking about yourself.”

“I’m more interested in you.”

“In my father.”

“I thought there’d be a lesson there for me. That’s all.”

“Some lessons you have to learn for yourself.”

“Probably true. But I try to learn them from others when I can. I’m sorry for pressing.”

She gave me a small smile. “That’s okay. This is all still a little recent.”

“Of course it is,” I said, recognizing the dead end. I looked at my watch. “I should get you home.”

This was apt to be tricky. On the one hand, we had undeniable chemistry, and it wasn’t inconceivable that she would invite me up for a drink or something. If she did, I’d get a chance to make sure her apartment was secure, although I would have to be careful once we were inside. I couldn’t let anything stupid happen — more stupid than the time I had already spent with her and the things I had already said.

On the other hand, if she wanted to go home alone, it would be hard for me to escort her without seeming like I was angling for a way to get into her bed. It would be awkward. But I couldn’t just turn her loose alone. They knew where she lived.

We thanked Satoh-san for his hospitality and for the delicious introduction to the rare Ardbeg. I paid the bill, and we took the stairs down into the now slightly chilly Omotesando night air. The streets were quiet.

“Which way are you heading?” Midori asked me. “From around here, I usually walk.”

“I’ll go with you. I’d like to see you all the way home.”

“You don’t have to.”

I looked down for a moment, then back at her. “I’d like to,” I said again, thinking of Benny’s write-up on the bulletin board.

She smiled. “Okay.”

It was a fifteen-minute walk to her building. I didn’t observe anyone behind us. Not a surprise, given Mr. Bland’s departure from the scene.

When we reached the entranceway of her building, she took her keys out and turned to me. “Jaa . . .” Well, then . . .

It was a polite good night. But I had to see her inside. “You’ll be okay from here?”

She looked at me knowingly, although she didn’t really know. “I live here. I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. Have you got a phone number?” I already knew it, of course, but I had to keep up appearances.

“No, I don’t have a phone.”

Wow. That bad. “Yeah, I’m a bit of a Luddite myself. If something comes up, send me a smoke signal, okay?”

She giggled. “Five, two, seven, five-six, four, five, six. I was only teasing.”

“Right. Can I call you sometime?” In about five minutes, for example, to make sure there’s no one waiting for you in your apartment.

“I hope you will.”

I took out a pen and wrote the number down on my hand.

She was looking at me, half smiling. The kiss was there, if I wanted it.

I turned and walked back up the path toward the street.

She called out after me. “John?”

I turned.

“I think there’s a radical in you trying to get out.”

Several ripostes came quickly to mind. Instead: “Good night, Midori.”

I turned and walked away, pausing at the sidewalk to look back. But she had already gone inside, and the glass doors were closing behind her.

11

I SLIPPED INTO a parking area that faced the entrance. Hanging back beyond the perimeter of light cast from inside, I saw her waiting for an elevator to her right. From where I was standing I could see the doors open when it arrived but couldn’t see inside it. I watched her step inside, and then the doors closed.

No one seemed to be lurking outside. Unless they were waiting in her apartment or nearby, she would be safe for the night.

I took out Harry’s unit and activated her phone, then listened in on my cell phone. Silence.

A minute later, I heard her door being unlocked and opened, then closed. Muffled footsteps. Then the sound of more footsteps, from more than one person. A loud gasp.

Then a male voice: “Listen. Listen carefully. Don’t be afraid. We’re sorry to alarm you. We’re investigating a matter of national security. We have to move with great circumspection. Please understand.”

Midori’s voice, not much more than a whisper: “Show me . . . Show me identification.”

“We don’t have time for that. We have some questions that we need to ask you, and then we’ll leave.”

“Show me some ID,” I heard her say, her voice stronger now, “or I’m going to start making noise. And the walls in this building are really, really thin. People can probably already hear.”

My heart leaped. She had instinct and she had guts.

“No noise, please,” came the reply. Then the reverberation of a hard slap.

They were roughing her up. I was going to have to move.

I heard her breathing, ragged. “What the hell do you want?”

“Your father had something on his person around the time that he died. It is now in your possession. We need it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Another slap. Shit.

I couldn’t get into the building without a key. Even if someone entered or exited right then so that I could slip inside, I would never be able to make it into her apartment to help her. Maybe I could kick the door down. And maybe there would be four guys with guns standing ten feet away who would drop me before I was half inside.

I broke the connection with the unit and input her number on the cell phone. Her phone rang three times, then an answering machine cut in.

I hung up and repeated the procedure using the redial key, then again. And again.

I wanted to make them nervous, to give them pause. If someone tried to get through enough times, maybe they would let her answer it to allay potential suspicions.

On the fifth try, she picked up. “Moshi moshi,” she said, her voice uncertain.

“Midori, this is John. I know you can’t speak. I know there are men in your apartment. Say to me ‘There isn’t a man in my apartment, Grandma.’ ”

“What?”

“Say ‘There isn’t a man in my apartment, Grandma.’ Just say it!”

“There isn’t . . . There isn’t a man in my apartment, Grandma.”

“Good girl. Now say, ‘No, I don’t want you coming over now. There’s no one here.’ ”

“No, I don’t want you coming over now. There’s no one here.”

They’d be itching to get out of her apartment now. “Very good. Just keep arguing with your grandmother, okay? Those men are not the police; you know that. I can help you, but only if you get them out of your apartment. Tell them your father had some papers with him when he died, but that they’re hidden in his apartment. Tell them you’ll take them there and show them. Tell them you can’t describe the hiding place; it’s a place in the wall and you’ll have to show them. Do you understand?”

“Grandma, you worry too much.”

“I’ll be waiting outside,” I said, and broke the connection.

Which way are they likely to go? I thought, trying to decide where I could set up an ambush. But just then, an old woman, bent double at the waist from a childhood of poor nutrition and toil in the rice paddies, emerged from the elevator, carrying out her trash. The electronic doors parted for her as she shuffled outside, and I slipped into the building.

I knew Midori lived on the third floor. I bolted up the stairwell and paused outside the entrance to her floor, listening. After about half a minute of silence, I heard the sound of a door opening from somewhere down the corridor.

I opened the door part way, then took out my key chain and extended the dental mirror through the opening in the doorway until I had a view of a long, narrow hallway. A Japanese man was emerging from an apartment. He swept his head left and right, then nodded. A moment later Midori stepped out, followed closely by a second Japanese. The second one had his hand on her shoulder, not in a gentle way.

The one in the lead checked the corridor in both directions, then they started to move toward my position. I withdrew the mirror. There was a CO₂-type fire extinguisher on the wall, and I grabbed it and stepped to the right of the door, toward the side where it opened. I pulled the pin and aimed the nozzle face high.

Two seconds went by, then five. I heard their footsteps approaching, heard them right outside the door.

I breathed shallowly through my mouth, my fingers tense around the trigger of the unit.

For a split second, in my imagination, I saw the door start to open, but it didn’t. They had continued past it, heading for the elevators.

Damn. I had thought they would take the stairs. I eased the door open again and extended the mirror, adjusting its angle until I could see them. They had her sandwiched in tightly, the guy in the rear holding something against her back. I assumed a gun, but maybe a knife.

I couldn’t follow them from there with any hope of surprising them. I wouldn’t be able to close the distance before they heard me coming, and if they were armed, my chances would range from poor to nonexistent.

I turned and bolted down the stairs. When I got to the first floor I cut across the lobby, stopping behind a weight-bearing pillar that they’d have to walk past as they stepped off the elevator. I braced the extinguisher against my waist and eased the mirror past the corner of the pillar.

They emerged half a minute later, bunched up in a tight formation that you learn to avoid on day one in Special Forces because it makes your whole team vulnerable to an ambush or a mine. They were obviously afraid Midori was going to try to run.

I slipped the mirror and key chain back in my pocket, listening to their footsteps. When they sounded only a few centimeters away I bellowed a warrior’s kiyai and leaped out, pulling the trigger and aiming face high.

Nothing happened. The extinguisher hiccupped, then made a disappointing hissing sound. But that was all.

The lead guy’s mouth dropped open, and he started fumbling inside his coat. Feeling like I was moving in slow motion, sure I was going to be a second late, I brought the butt end of the extinguisher up. Saw his hand coming free, holding a short-barreled revolver. I stepped in hard and jammed the extinguisher into his face like a battering ram, getting my weight behind the blow. There was a satisfying thud and he spilled into Midori and the guy in the rear, his gun clattering to the floor.

The second guy stumbled backward, slipping clear of Midori, pinwheeling his left arm. He was holding a gun in his other hand and trying keep it in front of him.

I launched the extinguisher like a missile, catching him center mass. He went down and I was on him in an instant, catching hold of the gun and jerking it away. Before he could get his hands up to protect himself I smashed the butt into his mastoid process, behind the ear. There was a loud crack and he went limp.

I spun and brought the gun up, but his friend wasn’t moving. His face looked like he’d run into a flagpole.

I turned back to Midori just in time to see a third goon emerge from the elevator, where he must have been positioned from the beginning. He grabbed Midori around the neck from behind with his left hand, trying to use her as a shield, while his right hand went to his jacket pocket, groping for a weapon. But before he could pull it free, Midori spun counterclockwise inside his grip, catching his left wrist in her hands and twisting his arm outward and back in a classic aikido san-kyo joint lock. His reaction showed training: he threw his body in the direction of the lock to save his arm from being broken, and landed with a smooth ukemi break fall. But before he could recover I had closed the distance, launching a field-goal-style kick at his head with enough force to lift his whole body from the ground.

Midori was looking at me, her eyes wide, her breath coming in shallow gasps.

“Daijobu?” I asked, taking her by the arm. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”

She shook her head. “They told me they were the police, but I knew they weren’t: they wouldn’t show me any identification and why were they waiting in my apartment anyway? Who are they? How did you know they were in there?”

Keeping my hand on her arm, I started moving us through the lobby toward the glass doors, my eyes sweeping back and forth for signs of danger outside.

“I saw them at the Blue Note,” I said, urging her with the pressure on her arm to increase the pace. “When I realized they hadn’t followed us back, I thought they might be waiting for you at your apartment. That’s when I called.”

“You saw them at the Blue Note? Who are they? Who the hell are you?”

“I’m someone who’s stumbled onto something very bad and wants to protect you from it. I’ll explain later. Right now, we’ve got to get you someplace safe.”

“Safe? With you?” She stopped in front of the glass doors and looked back at the three men, their faces bloody masks, then back at me.

“I’ll explain everything to you, but not now. For now, the only thing that matters is that you’re in danger, and I can’t help you if you don’t believe me. Let me just get you somewhere safe and tell you what all this is about, okay?” The doors slid open, a hidden infrared eye having sensed our proximity.

“Where?”

“Someplace where no one would know to look for you, or wait for you. A hotel, something like that.”

The goon I had kicked groaned and started to pull himself up onto all fours. I strode over and drop-kicked him in the face again, and he went down. “Midori, we don’t have time to discuss this here. You’re going to have to believe me. Please.”

The doors slid shut.

I wanted to search the men on the floor for ID or some other way of identifying them, but I couldn’t do that and get Midori moving at the same time.

“How do I know I can believe you?” she said, but she was moving again. The doors opened.

“Trust your instincts; that’s all I can tell you. They’ll tell you what’s right.”

We moved through the doors, and with the wider range of vision that our new position afforded me I was able to see a squat and ugly Japanese man standing about five meters back and to the left. He had a nose that looked like a U-turn — it must have been broken so many times he gave up having it set. He was watching the scene in the foyer, and seemed uncertain of what to do. Something about his posture, his appearance, told me he wasn’t a civilian. Probably he was with the three on the floor.

I steered Midori to the right, keeping clear of the flat-nosed guy’s position. “How could you know . . . how could you know that there were men in my apartment?” she asked. “How did you know what was happening?”

“I just knew, okay?” I said, turning my head, searching for danger, as we walked. “Midori, if I were with these people, what would I gain from this charade? They had you exactly where they wanted you. Please, let me help you. I don’t want to see you get hurt. That’s the only reason I’m here.”

I saw the flat-nosed guy go inside as we moved away from the scene, I assumed to help his fallen comrades.

If they had been planning to take her somewhere, they would have had a car. I looked around, but there were too many vehicles parked in the area for me to be able to pinpoint theirs.

“Did they say where they were going to take you?” I asked. “Who they were with?”

“No,” she said. “I told you, they only said they were with the police.”

“Okay, I understand.” Where the hell was their car? There might have been more of them. All right, go, just keep on walking, they’ll have to show themselves if they want to take you.

We cut across the dark parking lot of the building across from hers, emerging onto Omotesando-dori, where we caught a cab. I told the driver to take us to the Seibu Department Store in Shibuya. I checked the side views as we drove. There were few cars on the road, and none seemed to be trying to tail us.

What I had in mind was a love hotel. The love hotel is a Japanese institution, born of the country’s housing shortage. With families, sometimes extended ones, jammed into small apartments, Mom and Dad need to have somewhere to go to be alone. Hence the rabu hoteru — places with rates for either a “rest” or a “stay,” famously discreet front desk, no credit card required for registration, and fake names the norm. Some of them are completely over-the-top, with theme rooms sporting Roman baths and Americana settings, like what you’d get if you turned the Disney Epcot Center into a bordello.

Beyond Japan’s housing shortage, the hotels arose because inviting a stranger into your home tends to be a much more intimate act in Japan than it is in the States. There are plenty of Japanese women who will allow a man into their bodies before permitting him to enter their apartments, and the hotels serve this aspect of the market, as well.

The people we were up against weren’t stupid, of course. They might guess that a love hotel would make an expedient safe house. That would be my guess, if the tables were turned. But with about ten thousand rabu hoteru in Tokyo, it would still take them awhile to track us down.

We got out of the cab and walked to Shibuya 2-chome, which is choked with small love hotels. I chose one at random, where we told the old woman standing inside at the front desk that we wanted a room with a bath, for a yasumi — a stay, not just a rest. I put cash on the counter and she reached underneath, then handed us a key.

We took the elevator to the fifth floor, and found our room at the end of a short hallway. I unlocked the door and Midori went in first. I followed her in, locking the door behind me. We left our shoes in the entranceway. There was only one bed — twins in a love hotel would be as out of place as a Bible — but there was a decent-sized couch in the room that I could curl up on.

Midori sat down on the edge of the bed and faced me. “Here’s where we are,” she said, her voice even. “Tonight three men were waiting for me in my apartment. They claimed to be police, but obviously weren’t — or, if they were police, they were on some kind of private mission. I’d think you were with them, but I saw how badly you hurt them. You asked me to go somewhere safe with you so you could explain. I’m listening.”

I nodded, trying to find the right words to begin. “You know this has to do with your father.”

“Those men told me he had something they wanted.”

“Yes, and they think you have it now.”

“I don’t know why they would think that.”

I looked at her. “I think you do.”

“Think what you want.”

“You know what’s wrong with this picture, Midori? Three men are waiting for you in your apartment, they rough you up a little, I appear out of nowhere and rough them up a lot, none of this exactly an average day in the life of a jazz pianist, and the whole time you’ve never once suggested that you want to go to the police.”

She didn’t answer.

“Do you want to? You can, you know.”

She sat facing me, her nostrils flaring slightly, her fingers drumming along the edge of the bed. Goddamnit, I thought, what does she know that she hasn’t been telling me?

“Tell me about your father, Midori. Please. I can’t help you if you don’t.”

She leaped off the bed and faced me squarely. “Tell you?” she spat. “No, you tell me! Tell me who the fuck you are, or I swear I will go to the police, and I don’t care what happens after that!”

Progress, of a sort, I thought. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything!”

“Okay.”

“Starting with, who were those men in my apartment?”

“Okay.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know who they are.”

“But you knew they were there?”

She was going to pull hard at that loose thread until the entire fabric unraveled. I didn’t know how to get around it. “Yes.”

“How?”

“Because your apartment is bugged.”

“Because my apartment is bugged . . . Are you with those men?”

“No.”

“Would you please stop giving me one-word answers? Okay, my apartment is bugged, by who, by you?”

There it was. “Yes.”

She looked at me for a long beat, then sat back down on the bed. “Who do you work for?” she asked, her voice flat.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Another long beat, and the same flat tone: “Then tell me what you want.”

I looked at her, wanting her to see my eyes. “I want to make sure you don’t get hurt.”

Her face was expressionless. “And you’re going to do that by . . .”

“These people are coming after you because they think you have something that could harm them. I don’t know what. But as long as they think you have it, you’re not going to be safe.”

“But if I were to just give whatever it is to you . . .”

“Without knowing what the thing is, I don’t even know if giving it to me would help. I told you, I’m not here for whatever it is. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Can’t you see what this looks like from my perspective? ‘Just hand it over so I can help you.’ ”

“I understand that.”

“I’m not sure you do.”

“Doesn’t matter. Tell me about your father.”

There was a long pause. I knew what she was going to say, and she said it: “This is why you were asking all those questions before. You came to Alfie and, God, everything . . . You’ve just been using me from the beginning.”

“Some of what you’re saying is true. Not all of it. Now tell me about your father.”

“No.”

I felt a flush of anger in my neck. Easy, John. “The reporter was asking, too, wasn’t he? Bulfinch? What did you tell him?”

She looked at me, trying to gauge just how much I knew. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I looked at the door and thought, Walk away. Just walk away.

But instead: “Listen to me, Midori. All I have to do is walk out that door. You’re the one who won’t be able to sleep in her own apartment, who’s afraid to go to the police, who can’t go back to her life. So you figure out a way to work with me on this, or you can damn well figure it all out on your own.”

A long time, maybe a full minute, passed. Then she said, “Bulfinch told me my father was supposed to deliver something to him on the morning he died, but that Bulfinch never got it. He wanted to know if I had it, or if I knew where it was.”

“What was it?”

“A computer disk. That’s all he would tell me. He told me if he said more it would put me in danger.”

“He had already compromised you just by talking to you. He was being followed outside of Alfie.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “Do you know anything about this disk?”

“No.”

I looked at her, trying to judge. “I don’t think I have to tell you, the people who want it aren’t particularly restrained about the methods they’ll use to get it.”

“I understand that.”

“Okay, let’s put together what we have. Everyone thinks your father told you something, or gave you something. Did he? Did he tell you anything, or give you some documents, maybe, anything that he said was important?”

“No. Nothing I remember.”

“Try. A safe-deposit key? A locker key? Did he tell you that he had hidden something, or that he had important papers somewhere? Anything like that?”

“No,” she said, after a moment. “Nothing.”

She might be holding back, I knew. She certainly had reason not to trust me.

“But you know something,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d go to the police.”

She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me.

“For Christ’s sake, Midori, tell me. Let me help you.”

“It’s not what you’re hoping for,” she said.

“I’m not hoping for anything. Just what pieces you can give me.”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “I told you my father and I were . . . estranged for a long time. It started when I was a teenager, when I started to understand Japan’s political system, and my father’s place in it.”

She got up and began to pace around the room, not looking at me. “He was part of the Liberal Democratic Party machine, working his way up the ladder in the old Kensetsusho, the Ministry of Construction. When the Kensetsusho became the Kokudokotsusho, he was made vice minister of land and infrastructure — of public works. Do you know what that means in Japan?”

“I know a little. The public-works program channels money from the politicians and construction firms to the yakuza.”

“And the yakuza provide ‘protection,’ dispute resolution, and lobbying for the construction industry. The construction companies and yakuza are like twins separated at birth. Did you know that construction outfits in Japan are called gumi?”

Gumi means “gang,” or “organization” — the same moniker the yakuza gangs use for themselves. The original gumi were groups of men displaced by World War II who worked for a gang boss doing whatever dirty jobs they could to survive. Eventually these gangs morphed into today’s yakuza and construction outfits.

“I know,” I said.

“Then you know that, after the war, there were battles between construction companies that were so big the police were afraid to intervene. A bid-rigging system was established to stop these fights. The system still exists. My father ran it.”

She laughed. “Remember in 1994 when Kansai International Airport was built in Osaka? The airport cost fourteen billion dollars, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Remember how Takumi Masaru, the Yamaguchi Gumi yakuza boss, was murdered that year? It was for not sharing enough of the profits from the airport construction. My father ordered his death to appease the other gang bosses.”

“Christ, Midori,” I said quietly. “Your father told you these things?”

“When he learned he was terminal. He needed to confess.”

I waited for her to go on.

“The yakuza with tattoos and sunglasses, the ones you see in the bad sections of Shinjuku, they’re just tools for people like my father,” she said, continuing her slow pacing. “These people are part of a system. The politicians vote for useless public works that feed the construction companies. The construction companies allow politicians to use company staff as ‘volunteers’ during election campaigns. Construction Ministry bureaucrats are given postretirement ‘advisor’ jobs at construction companies — just a car and driver and other perks, but no work. Every year during budget season, officials from the Ministry of Finance and the Construction Ministry meet with politicians loyal to the industry to decide how to divvy up the pie.”

She stopped pacing and looked at me. “Do you know that Japan has four percent of the land area and half the population of America, but spends a third more on public works? Some people think that in the last ten years ten trillion yen of government money have been paid to the yakuza through public works.”

Ten trillion? I thought. That’s maybe a hundred billion dollars. Bastards have been holding out on you.

“I know about some of this, sure,” I told her. “Your father was going to blow the whistle?”

“Yes. When he was diagnosed, he called me. It was the first time we had talked in over a year. He told me he had to talk to me about something important, and he came over to my apartment. We hadn’t talked in so long, I was thinking it was something about his health, about his heart. He looked older when I saw him and I knew I was right, or almost right.

“I made us tea, and we sat across from each other at the small table in my kitchen. I told him about the music I was working on, but of course I could never ask him about his work, and there was almost nothing for us to talk about. Finally I said, ‘Papa, what is it?’

“ ‘Taishita koto jaa nai,’ he told me. ‘Nothing big.’ Then he looked at me and smiled, his eyes warm but sad, and for a second he looked to me the way he had when I was a little girl. ‘I found out this week that I don’t have very long to live,’ he said to me, ‘not very long at all. A month, maybe two. Longer if I choose to suffer from radiation and drugs, which I don’t wish to do. The strange thing is that when I heard this news it didn’t bother me, or even surprise me very much.’ Then his eyes filled up, which I had never seen before. He said, ‘What bothered me wasn’t losing my life, but knowing that I had already lost my daughter.’ ”

With a quick, economical movement she raised her right hand and wiped the edge of one eye, then the other. “He told me about all the things he had been involved in, all the things he had done. He told me he wanted to do something to make it right, that he would have done something much sooner but he had been a coward, knowing he would be killed if he tried. He also said that he was afraid for me, that the people he was involved with wouldn’t hesitate to attack someone’s family to send a message. He was planning to do something now, something that would make things right, he told me, but if he did it I might be in danger.”

“What was he going to do?”

“I don’t know. But I told him I couldn’t accept being a hostage to a corrupt system, that if we were going to reconcile he would have to act without regard to me.”

I considered. “That was brave of you.”

She looked at me, in full control again. “Not really. Don’t forget, I’m a radical.”

“Well, we know he was talking to that reporter, Bulfinch, that he was supposed to deliver a disk. We need to figure out what was supposed to be on it.”

“How?”

“I think by contacting Bulfinch directly.”

“And telling him what?”

“I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

We were quiet for a minute, and I started to feel exhaustion setting in.

“Why don’t we get some sleep,” I said. “I’ll take the couch, all right? And we can talk more tomorrow. Things will seem clearer then.”

I knew they couldn’t become more murky.

12

I GOT UP early the next morning and went straight to Shibuya Station, telling Midori that I would call her later on her cell phone, after I picked up some things that I needed. I had a few items hidden in my place in Sengoku, among them an alias passport, which I’d want if I had to leave the country suddenly. I told her to go out only when she really had to, knowing that she would need to buy food and a change of clothes, and not to use plastic for any purchases. I also told her that, in case anyone had her cell phone number, we needed to keep our conversations brief, and that she should assume someone was listening to anything we said.

I took the Yamanote line to Ikebukuro, a crowded, anonymous commercial and entertainment center in the northwest of the city, then got off and flagged down a cab outside the station. I took the cab to Haku-san, a residential neighborhood about a ten-minute walk from my apartment, where I got out and dialed the voice-mail account that’s attached to the phone in my apartment.

The phone has a few special features. I can call in anytime from a remote location and silently activate the unit’s speakerphone, essentially turning it into a transmitter. The unit is also sound activated: if there’s a noise in the room, a human voice, for example, the unit’s speakerphone feature is silently activated and it dials a voice-mail account that I keep in the States, where telco competition keeps the price of such things reasonable. Before I go home, I always call the voice-mail number. If someone has been in my apartment in my absence, I’ll know.

The truth is, the phone is probably unnecessary. Not only has no one ever been in my apartment unannounced; no one even knows where I really live. I pay for a six-mat flat in Ochanomizu, but I never go there. The place in Sengoku is leased under a corporate name with no connection to me. If you’re in this line of work, you’d better have an additional identity or two.

I looked up and down the street, listening to the beeps as the call snaked its way under the Pacific. When the connection went through, I punched in my code.

Every time I’ve done this, except for when I periodically test the system, I’ve listened to a mechanical woman’s voice say, “You have no calls.” I was expecting the same today.

Instead the message was “You have one call.”

Son of a bitch. I was so startled I couldn’t remember what button to press to hear the message, but the mechanical voice prompted me. Barely breathing, I pressed the “one” key.

I heard a man’s voice, speaking Japanese. “Small place. Hard to catch him by surprise when he comes in.”

Another man’s voice, also in Japanese: “Wait here, on the side of the genkan. When he arrives, use the pepper spray.”

I knew that voice, but it took me a minute to place it — I was used to hearing it in English.

Benny.

“What if he doesn’t want to talk?”

“He’ll talk.”

I was gripping the phone hard. That piece of shit Benny. How did he track me down?

When did this message get recorded? What was that special-functions button . . . Goddamnit, I should have run through this a few more times for practice before it really mattered. I’d gotten complacent. I hit six. That speeded up the message. Shit. I tried five. The mechanical woman informed me that this message was made by an outside caller at 2:00 P.M. That was California time, which meant that they entered my apartment at about 7:00 this morning, maybe an hour ago.

Okay, change of plan. I saved the message, hung up, and called Midori on her cell phone. I told her I had found out something important and would tell her about it when I got back, that she should wait for me even if I was late. Then I backtracked to Sugamo, once notorious as the site of a SCAP prison for Japanese war criminals, now better known for its red-light district and accompanying love hotels.

I picked the hotel that was closest to Sengoku. The room they gave me was dank. I didn’t care. I just wanted a landline, so I wouldn’t have to worry about my cell phone battery dying, and a place to wait.

I dialed the phone in my apartment. It didn’t ring, but I could hear when the connection had gone through. I sat and waited, listening, but after a half hour there still wasn’t any sound and I started to wonder if they’d left. Then I heard a chair sliding against the wood floor, footsteps, and the unmistakable sound of a man urinating in the toilet. They were still there.

I sat like that all day, listening in on nothing. The only consolation was that they must have been as bored as I was. I hoped they were as hungry.

At around 6:30, while I was doing some judo stretches to keep limber, I heard a phone ring on the other end of the line. Sounded like a cellular. Benny answered, grunted a few times, then said, “I have something to attend to in Shibakoen — shouldn’t take more than a few hours.”

I heard his buddy answer, “Hai,” but I wasn’t really listening anymore. If Benny was going to Shibakoen, he’d take the Mita line subway south from Sengoku Station. He wouldn’t have driven; public transportation is lower profile, and there’s nowhere for nonresidents to park in Sengoku anyway. From my apartment to the station, he could choose more or less randomly from a half dozen parallel and perpendicular streets — one of the reasons I had originally chosen the place. The station was too crowded; I couldn’t intercept him there. Besides, I didn’t know what he looked like. I had to catch him leaving the apartment or I was going to lose him.

I bolted out of the room and flew down the stairs. When I hit the sidewalk I cut straight across Hakusan-dori, then made a left on the artery that would take me to my street. I was running as fast as I could while trying to hug the buildings I passed — if I timed this wrong and Benny emerged at the wrong moment, he was going to see me coming. He knew where I lived, and I couldn’t be certain any longer that he wouldn’t know my face.

When I was about fifteen meters from my street I slowed to a walk, staying close to the exterior wall of an enclosed house, controlling my breathing. At the corner I crouched low and eased my head out, looking to the right. No sign of Benny. No more than four minutes had passed since I’d hung up the phone. I was pretty sure I hadn’t missed him.

There was a streetlight directly overhead, but I had to wait where I was. I didn’t know whether he’d make a right or left leaving the building, and I had to be able to see him when he exited. Once I’d gotten my hands on him, I could drag him into the shadows.

My breathing had slowed to normal when I heard the external door to the building slam shut. I smiled. The residents know the door slams and are careful to let it close slowly.

I crouched down again and peered past the edge of the wall. A pudgy Japanese was walking briskly in my direction. The same guy I had seen with the attaché case in the subway station at Jinbocho. Benny. I should have known.

I stood up and waited, listening to his footsteps getting louder. When he sounded like he was about a meter away, I stepped out into the intersection.

He pulled up short, his eyes bulging. He knew my face, all right. Before he could say anything I stepped in close, pumping two uppercuts into his abdomen. He dropped to the ground with a grunt. I stepped behind him, grabbed his right hand, and twisted his wrist in a pain-compliance hold. I gave it a sharp jerk and he yelped.

“On your feet, Benny. Move fast, or I’ll break your arm.” I gave his wrist another hard jerk to emphasize the point. He wheezed and hauled himself up, making sucking noises.

I shoved him around the corner, put him facefirst against the wall, and quickly patted him down. In his overcoat pocket I found a cell phone, which I took, but that was all.

I gave a last jerk on his arm, then spun him around and slammed him up against the wall. He grunted but still hadn’t recovered enough wind to do more. I pinched his windpipe with the fingers of one hand and took an undergrip on his balls with the other.

“Benny. Listen very carefully.” He started to struggle, and I pinched his windpipe harder. He got the message. “I want to know what’s going on. I want names, and they better be names I know.”

I relaxed both grips a little, and he sucked in his breath. “I can’t tell you this stuff, you know that,” he wheezed.

I took up the grip on his throat again. “Benny, I’m not going to hurt you if you tell me what I want to know. But if you don’t tell me, I’ve got to blame you, understand? Tell me quick, no one’s going to know.” Again, a little more pressure on the throat — this time, cutting off all his oxygen for a few seconds. I told him to nod if he understood, and after a second or two with no air, he did. I waited another second anyway, and when the nodding got vigorous, I eased off the pressure.

“Holtzer, Holtzer,” he rasped. “Bill Holtzer.”

It was an effort, but I revealed no surprise at the sound of the name. “Who’s Holtzer?”

He looked at me, his eyes wide. “You know him! From Vietnam, that’s what he told me.”

“What’s he doing in Tokyo?”

“He’s CIA. Tokyo chief of station.”

Chief of station? Unbelievable. He obviously still knew just which asses to kiss.

“You’re a damn CIA asset, Benny? You?”

“They pay me,” he said, breathing hard. “I needed the money.”

“Why is he coming after me?” I asked, searching his eyes. Holtzer and I had tangled when we were in Vietnam, but he’d come out on top in the end. I couldn’t see how he’d still be carrying a grudge, even if I still carried mine.

“He said you know where to find a disk. I’m supposed to get it back.”

“What disk?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that in the wrong hands it would be detrimental to the national security of the United States.”

“Try not to sound like the Stepford bureaucrat, Benny. Tell me what’s on the disk.”

“I don’t know! Holtzer didn’t tell me. It’s need-to-know — you know that, why would he have told me? I’m just an asset, no one tells me these things.”

“Who’s the guy in my apartment with you?”

“What guy . . . ,” he started to say, but I snapped his windpipe shut before he could finish. He tried to suck in air, tried to push me away, but he couldn’t. After a few seconds, I eased off the pressure.

“If I have to ask you something twice again, or if you try to lie to me again, Benny, it’s going to cost you. Who is the guy in my apartment?”

“I don’t know him,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut and swallowing. “He’s with the Boeicho Boeikyoku. Holtzer handles the liaison. He just told me to take him to your apartment so we could question you.”

The Boeicho Boeikyoku, or Bureau of Defense Policy, National Defense Agency, is Japan’s CIA.

“Why were you following me in Jinbocho?” I asked.

“Surveillance. Trying to locate the disk.”

“How did you find out where I live?”

“Holtzer gave me the address.”

“How did he get it?”

“I don’t know. He just gave it to me.”

“What’s your involvement?”

“Questions. Just questions. Finding the disk.”

“What were you supposed to do with me after you were done asking me your questions?”

“Nothing. They just want the disk.”

I pinched shut his windpipe again. “Bullshit, Benny, not even you could be that stupid. You knew what was going to happen afterwards, even if you wouldn’t have the balls to do it yourself.”

It was coming together. I could see it. Holtzer tells Benny to take this “Boeikyoku” guy to my apartment to “question” me. Benny figures out what’s going to happen. The little bureaucrat is scared, but he’s caught in the middle. Maybe he rationalizes that it’s not really his affair. Besides, Mr. Boeikyoku would take care of the wet stuff; Benny wouldn’t even have to watch.

The cowardly little weasel. I squeezed his balls suddenly and hard, and he would have cried out if I hadn’t had the grip on his throat. Then I let go in both places and he spilled to the ground, retching.

“Okay, Benny, here’s what you’re going to do,” I said. “You’re going to call your buddy at my apartment. I know he has a cell phone. Tell him you’re calling from the subway station. I’ve been spotted, and he needs to meet you at the station immediately. Use my exact words. If you use your own words or I hear you say anything that doesn’t fit with that message, I’ll kill you. Do it right, and you can go.” Of course, it was always possible that these guys used an all-clear code, the absence of which indicated a problem, but I didn’t think they were that smart. Besides, I hadn’t heard anything like an all-clear code on the call Benny got in my apartment.

He looked up at me, his eyes pleading. “You’ll let me go?”

“If you do this letter-perfect.” I handed him his phone.

He did it, just like I told him to. His voice sounded pretty steady. I took the phone back when he was done. He was still looking up at me from his knees. “I can go now?” he said.

Then he saw my eyes. “You promised! You promised!” he panted. “Please, I was only following orders.” He actually said it.

“Orders are a bitch,” I said, looking down at him.

He was starting to hyperventilate. “Don’t kill me! I have a wife and children!”

My hips were already swiveling into position. “I’ll have someone send flowers,” I whispered, and blasted the knife edge of my hand into the back of his neck. I felt the vertebrae splinter and he spasmed, then slumped to the ground.

There was nothing I could do but leave him there. But my apartment was already blown. I was going to have to find another, anyway, so the heat the body would bring to Sengoku would be as irrelevant as it was unavoidable.

I stepped over the body and took a few steps back to the parking area I’d passed. I heard the door to my building slam shut.

The front of the parking area was roped off, and the ropes were strung across pylons that were planted in sand. I grabbed a fistful of sand from around one of the pylons and returned to my position at the corner of the wall, peeking out past the edge. I didn’t see Benny’s buddy. Shit, he’d made a right down the narrow alley connecting my street with the one parallel to it, about fifteen meters from my apartment. I had expected him to stick to the main roads.

This was a problem. He was ahead of me now, and there was nowhere I could set up for him and wait. Besides, I didn’t even know what he looked like. If he made it to the main artery by the station, I wouldn’t be able to separate him from all the other people. It had to be now.

I sprinted down my street, pulling up short at the alley. I flashed my head past the corner and saw a solitary figure walking away from me.

I scanned the ground, looking for a weapon. Nothing the right size for a club. Too bad.

I turned into the alley, about seven meters behind him. He was wearing a waist-length leather jacket and had a squat, powerful build. Even from behind, I could see that his neck was massive. He was carrying something with him — a cane, it looked like. Not good. The sand had better do the trick.

I had closed the gap to about three meters and was just getting ready to call out to him when he looked back over his shoulder. I hadn’t made a sound, and I’d been keeping my eyes off him for the most part and diverting my attention. There’s an old, animal part of you that can sense when you’re being hunted. I’d learned that in the war. But I’d also learned not to give off the vibrations that set off a person’s alarm bells. This guy had sensitive antennae.

He turned and faced me, and I could see the confusion in his expression. Benny had said I’d been spotted at the station. I was coming from the other direction. He was trying to clear the disparity with the central computer.

I saw his ears, puffed out like cauliflowers, disfigured from repeated blows. Japanese judoka and kendoka don’t believe in protective gear; practitioners sometimes wear their scarred lobes, which they develop from head butts in judo and bamboo sword blows in kendo, like badges of honor. Awareness of his possible skills registered at some level of my consciousness.

I used everything I had to project that I was just Joe Pedestrian wanting to go around him, to buy myself the extra second. I moved to the left, took two more steps. Caught the recognition hardening on his face. Saw the cane start to come up in slow motion, his left foot driving forward to add power to the blow.

I flung the sand in his face and leaped aside. His head recoiled but the cane kept coming up; a split second later it snapped down in a blur. Despite the power of the blow he brought it up short when it failed to connect with his target, and then, with the same fluid speed, he cut through the air horizontally. I moved back diagonally, off the line of attack, staying on my toes. I could see him grimacing, his eyes squeezed shut. The sand had hit him squarely. Keeping his hands from wiping his eyes showed a lot of training. But he couldn’t see.

He took a cautious step forward, the cane on guard. Tears were streaming from his wounded eyes. He could tell I was in front of him but he didn’t know where.

I had to wait until he was past me to make my move. I’d seen how fast he was with the cane.

He held his position, his nostrils flaring as though he was trying to catch my scent. Jesus, how is he keeping himself from wiping his eyes? I thought. He must be in agony.

With a loud kiyai he leapt forward, slashing horizontally at waist level. But he’d guessed wrong; I was farther back. Then, just as suddenly, he took two long steps backward, his left hand coming loose from the cane and desperately wiping at his eyes.

That’s what I’d been waiting for. I plunged in, raising my right fist for a hammer blow to his clavicle. I brought it down hard but at the last instant he shifted slightly, his trapezius muscles taking the impact. I followed with a left elbow strike, trying for the sphenoid but connecting mostly with his ear.

Before I could get in another blow, he had whipped the cane around behind me and grabbed it with his free hand. Then he yanked me into him with a bear hug, the cane slicing into my back. He arched backward and my feet left the ground. My breath was driven out of me. Pain exploded in my kidneys.

I fought the urge to force myself away, knowing that I couldn’t match his strength. Instead, I wrapped my arms around his neck and swung my legs up behind his back. The cane felt like it was going to cut through my spine.

The move surprised him and he lost his balance. He took a step backward, releasing the cane and pinwheeling his left arm. I crossed my legs behind his back and dropped my weight suddenly, forcing him to overcorrect and pitch forward onto me. We hit the ground hard. I was underneath and took most of the impact. But now we were in my parlor.

I grabbed a cross grip on the lapels of his jacket and slammed in gyaku-jujime, one of the first strangles a judoka learns. He reacted instantly, releasing the cane and going for my eyes. I whipped my head back and forth, trying to avoid his fingers, using my legs to control his torso. At one point he grabbed one of my ears but I yanked loose.

The choke wasn’t perfect. I had more windpipe than carotid, and he fought for a long time, his groping getting more desperate. But there was nothing he could do. I kept the grip even after he had stopped struggling, rotating my head to see if anyone was coming. Nobody.

When I was sure that we were well past the point where he could be playing dead, I released the grip and kicked out from under him. Christ, he was heavy. I slid away from him and stood up, my back screaming from the cane, my breath heaving in and out in ragged gasps.

I knew from long experience that he wasn’t dead. People black out from strangles in the dojo with some regularity; it’s not a serious thing. If the unconsciousness is deep, like this one was, then you need to sit them up and slap them on the back, do a little CPR to get them breathing again.

This guy was going to have to find someone else to jump-start his battery. I would have liked to have questioned him, but this was no Benny.

I squatted down, one hand on the ground to steady myself, and went through his pockets. Found a cell phone in the breast pocket of his jacket. Quickly went through his other pockets. Found the pepper spray. Other than that I came up empty.

I stood up, pulses of pain shooting through my back, and started walking toward my apartment. Two schoolgirls in their blue sailor uniforms were passing just as I emerged from the alley and turned left onto my street. Their mouths dropped when they saw me, but I ignored them. Why were they staring like that? I reached up with my hand, felt the wetness on my cheek. Shit, I was bleeding. He’d scratched the hell out of my face.

I walked to my building as quickly as I could, wincing as I went up the two flights of steps. I let myself in, then wet a washcloth at the bathroom sink and wiped some of the blood off my face. The image staring back at me from the mirror looked bad, and it was going to be awhile before it started to look better.

The apartment around me felt strange. It had always been a haven, an anonymous safe house. Now it had been exposed, by Holtzer and the Agency — two ghosts from a past I thought I’d left behind. I needed to know why they were after me. Professional? Personal? With Holtzer, probably both.

I grabbed the things I needed and shoved them into a bag, then headed for the door, turning once to glance around before leaving. Everything looked the same as always; there was no sign of the people who’d been here. I wondered when I would see the place again.

Outside I headed in the direction of Sugamo. From there I could catch the Yamanote line back to Shibuya, back to Midori. Maybe the cell phones would provide some clues.

13

BY THE TIME I reached the hotel, the pain in my back had become a dull throbbing. My left eye was swollen — he’d gotten a finger in there at one point — and my head ached, probably from when he’d tried to tear loose one of my ears.

I shuffled past the old woman at the front desk, flashing my keys as I went by so she’d know I was already registered. She glanced up and then went back to her reading. I tried to give her only my right profile, which was in better shape than the left. She didn’t seem to notice my face.

I knocked on the door so Midori would know I was coming and then let myself in with the key.

She was sitting on the bed, and jumped when she saw my swollen eye and the scratches on my face. “What happened?” she gasped, and despite the pain the concern in her voice warmed me.

“Someone was waiting for me at my apartment,” I said, locking the door behind me. I let my coat fall off my back and eased myself onto the couch. “It looks like we’re both pretty popular lately.”

She came over and knelt down next to me, her eyes searching my face. “Your eye looks bad. Let me get you some ice from the freezer.”

I watched her walk away from me. She was wearing jeans and a navy sweatshirt that she must have picked up while I was out, and with her hair tied back I had a nice view of the proportions of her shoulders and waist, the curve of her hips. The next thing I knew I was wanting her so much I could almost have forgotten the pain in my back. There was nothing I could do about it. As any soldier who’s really been through it can tell you, extreme horniness is a reaction to combat. One second you’re fighting for your life, and then when it’s over you’ve got a hard-on the size of Manhattan. I don’t know why it happens, but it does.

She came back with some ice in a towel and I shifted on the couch, embarrassed. Electric pain jolted through my back but it didn’t make a dent in my predicament. She knelt down again and held the ice against my eye, smoothing my hair back at the same time. Better if she’d just dumped the cubes in my lap.

She eased me back on the couch and I grimaced, intensely aware of how near she was. “Does that hurt?” she asked, her touch instantly becoming tentative.

“No, it’s okay. The guy who cut up my face hit me in the back with a cane. It’ll be okay.”

Midori held the ice against my eye, her free hand warm on the side of my head, while I sat stiffly, afraid to move and embarrassed at my reaction, and the moment spun slowly out.

At one point she shifted the ice, and I reached to take it from her, but she continued to hold it and my hand wound up covering hers. The back of her hand was warm against my palm, the ice cold on my fingertips. “That feels good,” I told her. She didn’t ask whether I meant the ice or her hand. I wasn’t sure myself.

“You were gone for a long time,” she said after a while. “I didn’t know what to do. I was going to call you, but then I was starting to think, maybe you and those men in my apartment set this up, like good cop, bad cop, to get me to trust you.”

“I would have thought the same. I can imagine how this must all seem to you.”

“It was starting to seem pretty unreal, actually. Until I saw you again.”

I looked at the towel, now speckled red where it had been pressed against my face. “Nothing like a little blood to make things seem real.”

“It’s true. The thing I kept coming back to was how hard you kicked that man at my apartment — I saw blood shoot from his nose. If I hadn’t seen that, I think I would have left while you were gone.”

“Makes me glad I caught him in the head.”

She laughed softly and pressed the towel against my face again. “Tell me what happened.”

“You don’t have anything to eat here, do you?” I asked. “I’m starving.”

She reached for a bag next to the couch and opened it for me. “I brought back some bento. Just in case.”

“Give me a few minutes,” I said, and started wolfing down rice balls, eggs, and vegetables. I washed it all down with a can of mixed fruit juice. It tasted great.

When I was finished, I shifted on the couch so I could see her better. “There were two of them at my apartment,” I said. “I knew one — an LDP flunky I know only as Benny. Turns out he’s connected to the CIA. Would that mean anything to you? Any connection to your father?”

She shook her head. “No. My father never said anything about a Benny or about the CIA.”

“Okay. The other guy was a kendoka — he had a cane that he used like a sword. I don’t know what the connection is. I managed to get both their cell phones. Maybe it’ll give me a clue about who he is.”

I took the ice from her with one hand and leaned across the couch to reach my coat, feeling angry bites of pain in my back as I did so. I pulled the coat over, reached into the inside breast pocket, and pulled out the phones. Both standard DoCoMo issue, small and sleek. “Benny told me the Agency is after the disk. I don’t know why they’re coming after me, though. Maybe they think . . . maybe they think I’m going to tell you something, put something together for you? That I can make use of what you’ve got? Figure out what it is? Prevent them from getting what they want?”

I flipped open the kendoka’s phone and pressed the recall button. A number lit up on the screen. “This is a start. We can do a reverse telephone number search. There might be some numbers preprogrammed, also. I’ve got a friend, someone I trust, who can help us with this.”

I stood up, wincing at the pain in my back. “We’re going to need to change hotels. Can’t behave any differently than the other satisfied patrons.”

She smiled. “I suppose that’s true.”

We changed to a nearby place called the Morocco, which seemed to be organized around some sort of Arabian Nights theme — Oriental rugs, hookahs, belly bracelets, and other harem gear for the woman to wear if she were so inclined. It was the picture of Bedouin luxury, but there was only one bed, and sleeping on the couch was going to be like a night on the rack.

“Why don’t you take the bed tonight?” she said, as though reading my mind. “With your back like that, you can’t very well sleep on this couch.”

“No, that’s okay,” I told her, feeling strangely embarrassed. “The couch is fine.”

“I’ll take the couch,” she said, with a smile that lingered.

I wound up accepting her offer, but my sleep was restless. I dreamed I was moving though dense jungle near Tchepone in southern Laos, hunted by an NVA counter-recon battalion. I had become separated from my team and was disoriented. I would sideslip and double back, but couldn’t shake the NVA. They had me surrounded, and I knew I was going to be captured and tortured. Then Midori was there, trying to get me to take a side arm. “I don’t want to be captured,” she was saying. “Please, help me. Take the gun. Don’t worry about me. Save my Yards.”

I snapped upright, my body coiled like a spring. Easy, John. Just a dream. I tightened my abdomen and forced a long hiss of air out through my nostrils, feeling like Crazy Jake was right there in the room with me.

My face was wet and I thought it was bleeding again, but when I put my hand to my cheek and looked at my fingers I realized that it was tears. What the hell is this? I thought.

The moon was low in the sky, its light flowing in through the window. Midori was sitting up on the couch, her knees drawn to her chest. “Bad dream?” she asked.

I flicked my thumb across the sides of my face. “How long have you been up?”

She shrugged. “Awhile. You were tossing and turning.”

“I say anything?”

“No. Are you afraid of what you might say in your sleep?”

I looked at her, one side of her face illuminated by moonlight, the other hidden in shadow. “Yes,” I said.

“What was the dream?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, lying. “Mostly just images.”

I could feel her looking at me. “You tell me to trust you,” she said, “but you won’t even tell me about a bad dream.”

I started to answer, then all at once felt irritated with her. I slid off the bed and walked over to the bathroom.

I don’t need her questions, I thought. I don’t need to take care of her. Fucking CIA, Holtzer, knows I’m in Tokyo, knows where I live. I’ve got enough problems.

She was the key, I knew. Her father must have told her something. Or she had what whoever had broken into his apartment on the day of his funeral had been looking for. Why couldn’t she just realize what the hell it was?

I walked back into the bedroom and stood facing her. “Midori, you’ve got to try harder. You’ve got to remember. Your father must have told you something, or given you something.”

I saw surprise on her face. “I told you, he didn’t.”

“Someone broke into his apartment after he died.”

“I know. I got a call from the police when it happened.”

“The point is, they couldn’t find what they were looking for, and they think you have it.”

“Look, if you want to take a look around my father’s apartment, I can let you in. I haven’t cleaned it out yet, and I still have the key.”

The people who had broken in had come up empty, and my old friend Tatsu, as thorough a man as I have ever known, had been there afterward with the resources of the Keisatsucho. I knew another look would be a dead end, and her suggestion only served to increase my frustration.

“That’s not going to help. What would these people think that you have? The disk? Something it’s hidden in? A key? Are you sure you don’t have anything?”

I saw her redden slightly. “I told you, I don’t.”

“Well, try to remember something, can’t you?”

“No, I can’t,” she said, her voice angry. “How can I remember something if I don’t have it?”

“How can you be sure you don’t have it if you can’t remember it?”

“Why are you saying this? Why don’t you believe me?”

“Because nothing else makes sense! And I’ve got to tell you, I don’t like the feeling of people trying to kill me when I don’t even know why!”

She swung her feet to the floor and stood up. “Oh, it’s only you! Do you think I like it? I didn’t do anything! And I don’t know why these people are doing this, either!”

I exhaled slowly, trying to rein in my anger. “It’s because they think you have the damn disk. Or you know where it is.”

“Well, I don’t! Oai nikusama! Mattaku kokoroattari ga nai wa yo! Mo nan do mo so itteru ja nai yo!” I don’t know anything! I’ve already told you that!

We stood staring at each other at the foot of the bed, breathing hard. Then she said, “You don’t give a shit about me. You’re just after what they want, whatever it is.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is true! Mo ii! Dose anata ga doko no dare na no ka sae oshiete kurenain da kara!” I’ve had enough! You won’t even tell me who you are! She stalked over to the door and picked up a bag, started shoving her things into it.

“Midori, listen to me.” I walked over and grabbed the bag. “Listen to me, goddamnit! I do care about you! Can’t you see that?”

She tugged at the bag. “Why should I believe what you say when you don’t believe me? I don’t know anything! I don’t know!”

I yanked the bag out of her hands. “All right, I believe you.”

“Like hell you do. Give me my case. Give it to me!” She tried to grab it and I moved it behind my back.

She looked at me, her eyes briefly incredulous, then started hitting me in the chest. I dropped the bag and wrapped my arms around her to stop the blows.

Later, I couldn’t remember exactly how it happened. She was fighting me and I was trying to hold her arms. I became very aware of the feel of her body and then we were kissing, and it seemed as though she was still trying to hit me but it was more that we were tearing at each other’s clothes.

We made love on the floor at the foot of the bed. The sex was passionate, headlong. At times it was like we were still fighting. My back was throbbing, but the pain was almost sweet.

Afterwards I reached up and pulled the bedcovers over us. We sat with our backs against the edge of the bed.

“Yokatta,” she said, drawing out the last syllable. “That was good. Better than you deserved.”

I felt a little dazed. It had been a long time for me, a connection like that. It was almost unnerving.

“But you don’t trust me,” she went on. “That hurts.”

“It’s not trust, Midori. It’s . . . ,” I said, then stopped. “I believe you. I’m sorry for pushing so hard.”

“I’m talking about your dream.”

I pressed my fingertips to my eyes. “Midori, I can’t, I don’t . . .” I didn’t know what the hell to say. “I don’t talk about these things. If you weren’t there, you couldn’t understand.”

She reached over and gently pried my fingertips from my eyes, then held them without self-consciousness at her waist. Her skin and her breasts were beautiful in the diffused moonlight, the shadows pooled in the hollows above her clavicles. “You need to talk, I can feel that,” she said. “I want you to tell me.”

I looked down at the tangled sheets and blankets, the shadows carving stark hills and valleys like some alien landscape in the moonlight. “My mother . . . she was Catholic. When I was a kid, she used to take me to church. My father hated it. I used to go to confession. I used to tell the priest about all my lascivious thoughts, all the fights I’d been in, the kids I hated and how I wanted to hurt them. At first it was like pulling teeth, but it got addictive.

“But that was all before the war. In the war, I did things . . . that are beyond confession.”

“But if you keep them bottled up like this, they’ll eat you like poison. They are eating you.”

I wanted to talk to her. I wanted to let it out.

What’s with you? I thought. Do you want to drive her away?

Yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe that would be best. I couldn’t tell her about her father, but I could tell her something worse.

When I spoke, my voice was dry and steady. “Atrocities, Midori. I’m talking about atrocities.”

Always a good conversation starter. But she stayed with me. “I don’t know what you did,” she said, “but I know it was a long time ago. In another world.”

“It doesn’t matter. I can’t make you understand, not if you weren’t over there.” I pressed my fingertips to my eyes again, the reflex useless against the images playing in my mind.

“A part of me loved it, thrived on it. Operating in the NVA’s backyard, not everybody could do that. Some guys, when they’d hear the insert helicopters going off into the distance and the jungle go quiet, they’d panic, they couldn’t breathe. Not me. I had over twenty missions in Indian country. People would say I had used up all my luck, but I just kept going, and the missions kept getting crazier.

“I was one of the youngest One-Zeros — SOG team leaders — ever. My teammates and I were tight. We could be twelve guys against an NVA division, and I knew that not one of my people would run. And they knew I wouldn’t, either. Do you know what that’s like, for a kid who’s been ostracized his whole life because he’s a half-breed?”

I talked faster. “I don’t care who you are. If you wade that deeply into the blood and muck, you won’t stay clean. Some people are more susceptible than others, but eventually everyone goes over the edge. Two of your people are blown in half by a Bouncing Betty mine, their legs torn from their bodies. You’re holding what’s left of them in the last moments of their lives, telling them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay, you’re going to be okay,’ they’re crying and you’re crying and then they’re dead. You walk away, you’re covered with their insides.

“You lay your own booby traps for the enemy — that was one of our specialties, tit for tat — but there are only twelve of you and you can’t win that kind of war of attrition no matter how much more you bleed them than they bleed you. You take more losses, and the frustration — the rage, the strangling, muscle-bunching rage — just builds and builds. And then one day, you’re moving through a village with the power of life and death slung over your shoulder, sweeping back and forth, back and forth, muzzle forward. You’re in a declared free-fire zone, meaning anyone who isn’t a confirmed friendly is assumed to be Vietcong and treated accordingly. And intel tells you this village is a hotbed of V.C. activity, they’re feeding half the sector, they’re a conduit for arms that are flowing south down the Trail. The people are giving you sullen looks, and some mama-san says, ‘Hey, Joe, you fuck mommie, you number ten,’ some shit like that. I mean, you’ve got the intel. And two hours earlier you lost another buddy to a booby trap. Believe me, someone is going to pay.”

I took two deep breaths. “Tell me to stop, or I’m going to keep going.”

Midori was silent.

“The village was called Cu Lai. We herded all the people together, maybe forty or fifty people, including women and children. We burned their homes down right in front of them. We shot all their farm animals, massacred the pigs and cows. Effigy, you know? Catharsis. But it wasn’t cathartic enough.

“Now what are we supposed to do with these people? I used the radio, even though you’re not supposed to because the enemy can triangulate, they can find your position. But what were we supposed to do with these people? We had just destroyed their village.

“The guy on the other end of the radio, I still don’t know who, says, ‘Waste ’em.’ This was the way we described killing back then — so and so got wasted, we wasted ten V.C.

“I’m quiet, and the guy says again, ‘Waste ’em.’ Now this is unnerving. It’s one thing to be on the brink of hot-blooded murder. It’s another to have the impulse coolly sanctioned higher up the chain of command. Suddenly I’m scared, realizing how close we had been. I say, ‘Waste who?’ He says, ‘All of ’em. Everybody.’ I say, ‘We’re talking about forty, fifty people here, some women and children, too. Do you understand that?’ The guy says again, ‘Just waste ’em.’ ‘Can I have your name and rank?’ I say, because suddenly I’m not going to kill all these people just because a voice over the radio tells me to. ‘Son,’ the voice says, ‘I assure you if I told you my rank you’d shit your pants for me. You are in a declared free-fire zone. Now do as I say.’

“I told him I wouldn’t do it without being able to verify his authority. Then two more people, who claimed to be this guy’s superiors, got on the radio. One of them says, ‘You have been given a direct order under the authority of the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces. Obey this order or suffer the consequences.’

“So I went back to the rest of the unit to talk this over. They were guarding the villagers. I told them what I had just heard. For most of the guys, it had the same effect it had on me: it cooled them down, scared them. But some of them it excited. ‘No fucking way,’ they were saying. ‘They’re telling us to waste ’em? Far out.’ Still, everyone was hesitating.

“I had a friend, Jimmy Calhoun, who everyone called Crazy Jake. He hadn’t been contributing much to the conversation. All of a sudden he says, ‘Fucking pussies. Waste ’em means waste ’em.’ He starts yelling at the villagers in Vietnamese. ‘Get down, everybody on the ground! Num suyn!’ And the villagers complied. We were fascinated, wondering what he was going to do. Jimmy doesn’t even slow down, he just steps back, shoulders his rifle, then ka-pop! ka-pop! he starts shooting them. It was weird; no one tried to run away. Then one of the other guys yells ‘Crazy fuckin’ Jake!’ and shoulders his rifle, too. The next thing I knew we were all unloading our clips into these people, just blowing them apart. Clip runs out, press, slide, click, you put in a new clip and fire some more.”

My voice was still steady, my eyes fixed straight ahead, remembering. “If I could go back in time, I would try to stop it. I really would. I wouldn’t participate. And the memories dog me. I’ve been running for twenty-five years, but in the end, it’s like trying to lose a shadow.”

There was a protracted silence, and I imagined her thinking, I slept with a monster.

“I wish you hadn’t told me,” she said, confirming my suspicions.

I shrugged, feeling empty. “Maybe it’s better that you know.”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. It’s an upsetting story. Upsetting to hear what you’ve been through. I never thought of war as so . . . personal.”

“Oh, it was personal. On both sides. There were special medals for NVA — North Vietnamese Army soldiers — who killed an American. A severed head was the proof. If it was a SOG man you killed, you’d get an extra ten thousand piastres — several months’ pay.”

She touched my face again, and I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes. “You were right. You’ve been through horrors. I didn’t know.”

I took her hands and gently moved them away. “Hey, I didn’t even tell you the best part. The intel on the village being a V.C. stronghold? Bogus. No tunnel networks, no rice or weapons caches.”

“Sonna, sonna koto. . . ,” she said. “You mean . . . but, John, you didn’t know.”

I shrugged. “Not even any telltale tire tracks, which, c’mon, we could have taken a second to check for before we started slaughtering people.”

“But you were so young. You must have been out of your minds with fear, with anger.”

I could feel her looking at me. It was okay. After all this time, the words sounded dead to me, just sounds without content.

“Is that what you meant that first night?” she asked. “About not being a forgiving person?”

I remembered saying it to her, remembered her looking like she was going to ask me about it, then seeming to decide not to. “It’s not what I meant, actually. I was thinking of other people, not of myself. But I guess it applies to me, also.”

She nodded slowly, then said, “I have a friend from Chiba named Mika. When I was in New York, she had a car accident. She hit a little girl who was playing in the street. Mika was driving at forty-five kilometers per hour, the speed limit, and the little girl drove her bicycle out right in front of the car. There was nothing she could do. It was bad luck. It would have happened to anyone who was driving the car right there and right then.”

On a certain level, I understood what she was getting at. I’d known it all along, even before the psych evaluation they made me take at one point to see how I was handling the special stress of SOG. The shrink they made me talk to had said the same thing: “How can you blame yourself for circumstances that were beyond your control?”

I remember that conversation. I remember listening to his bullshit, half angry, half amused at his attempts to draw me out. Finally, I just said to him, “Have you ever killed anyone, Doc?” When he didn’t answer, I walked out. I don’t know what kind of evaluation he gave me. But they didn’t turn me loose from SOG. That came later.

“Do you still work with these people?” she asked.

“There are connections,” I responded.

“Why?” she asked after a moment. “Why stay attached to things that give you nightmares?”

I glanced over at the window. The moon had moved higher in the sky, its light slowly ebbing from the room. “It’s a hard thing to explain,” I said slowly. I watched her hair glistening in the pale light, like a vertical sheet of water. I ran my fingers through it, gathered it in my hand and let it fall free. “Some of what I was part of in Vietnam didn’t sit well with me when I got back to the States. Some things belong only in a war zone, but then they want to follow you when you leave. After the war, I found I couldn’t go back to the life I’d left behind. I wanted to come back to Asia, because Asia was where my ghosts were least restless, but it was more than just geography. All the things I’d done made sense in war, they were justified by war, I couldn’t live with them outside of war. So I needed to stay at war.”

Her eyes were pools of darkness. “But you can’t stay at war forever, John.”

I gave her a wan smile. “A shark can’t stop swimming, or it dies.”

“You’re not a shark.”

“I don’t know what I am.” I rubbed my temples with my fingers, trying to work through the images, past and present, that were colliding in my brain. “I don’t know.”

We were quiet for a while, and I felt a pleasant drowsiness descend. I was going to regret all this. Some lucid part of my mind saw that clearly. But sleep seemed so much more urgent, and anyway what was done was already done.

I slept, but the pain in my back kept the sleep fitful, and in those moments where consciousness briefly crested I would have doubted everything that had happened if she hadn’t been lying next to me. Then I would slide down into sleep again, there to struggle with ghosts even more personal, more terrible, than those of which I could tell Midori.