“Not really. But you not either.” She patted my arm and laughed.
“You know what? I’m gonna go to Vegas and I’m gonna find this fucker. And then I’m gonna hit him a little before I break his arm.”
This time she laughed hard, covering her mouth and regarding me with drunken pity. “You a silly, stupid man,” she said.
I RETURNED TO FUJI WEST at 8:00, as the sun was setting. I drove this time. The parking lot was half full, mostly fancy cars, and I immediately spotted the silver Porsche in the back row. Sure enough, it had the right tag. I rechecked the five-shot in my ankle holster. My hands felt bruised from the hot, dry air.
Inside, the restaurant was cool and dark and very Zen. Piano music drifted along the ceiling beams overhead. Booth tables with high-backed wooden seats, lighted by small suspended lanterns, lined the walls like confessionals. Candlelit tables filled in the space between the booths and the circular sushi bar, an island at the center of the restaurant manned by three hatted sushi chefs in white who resembled sailors. Flanking the bar were two enormous aquariums filled with exotic-looking fish staring out calmly at the twenty or so patrons in the restaurant, most of whom easily outdressed me.
I asked for a table near the bar and ordered a Japanese beer and told the hostess I was waiting for a friend. I’d barely wet my lips before Sonny’s young Doberman appeared and sat himself across from me, as casually as if I’d invited him.
He was now dressed in a charcoal suit, set off by another beautiful pink tie, looking very ready to be someone’s best man. He waved at a waitress, who swiftly brought him a bottle of Perrier and a glass with a straw. Pouring the Perrier into the glass, he said to me, “So you did not like my advice.” His voice was gentle but humorless. He sipped his Perrier with the straw like a child. In the aquarium directly behind him, a long brown eel swam slowly through his head.
“My business with Sonny is important.”
“I’m sure it is. Except my father has no business with you.”
I drank my beer and tried to hide my surprise. I searched his face for some resemblance of the hard man I’d already envisioned in my head. “So you know who I am.”
“Miss Hong’s friend Happy is also a friend of mine. She visited me recently and mentioned that she had been seeing you. That is, until last month. You stopped taking her calls. She got worried. She told me what you had been planning to do. She did not know how serious you were, but she wanted to tell me for your sake. She likes you, Mr. Robert, and I suppose she has some womanly notion of saving you. She did not tell Miss Hong, of course, or my father. So only I know that you are here. And that is a good thing.”
“Because your father’s a dangerous man?”
He eyed me sternly, drawing together his dark handsome eyebrows. “Because my father does not have my patience.”
The hostess came by and whispered something into his ear, and Sonny Jr. looked to the front of the restaurant, where a large party had arrived, people in suits and dresses. He stood and gestured for a waiter, then gave him and the hostess rapid orders in Vietnamese. He glanced at me distractedly and went on with his instructions. He watched them walk away and continued watching as they saw to the party.
His father might have been a poker-playing gangster, or maybe a gangster-playing poker player, but for the moment Junior seemed nothing more than what he appeared: the young manager of a restaurant.
He turned back to me, adjusting his tie, his face once again as calm as the fish. “You were a narcotics investigator once. Ten years ago, I believe.”
I took another swill of my beer. “Nice detective work.”
“You did it for only two years and then returned to being a patrol officer. Why?”
“It didn’t suit me. Why do you want to know?”
“Because the answer matters. You do not strike me as someone who gives up easily.”
“I didn’t give up on anything,” I said, a little too loudly. His facts were accurate but told a meaningless story. He had no idea how good I was at prying into other people’s lives, how tedious and occasionally thrilling the job was, or how enjoying it emptied me because I didn’t care to know so much about people I cared nothing for. “It just wasn’t my cup of tea.”
He tried to puzzle me out, like he was readying a few more questions. But then he grabbed the linen napkin on the table and stood. He dabbed at his forehead with the napkin, pocketed it, and said, “I have something to show you. It will behoove you to come with me.”
“I’m guessing this something is not your father.”
Instead of answering me, he nodded toward the front of the restaurant. “You are free to go if you want. But I think you will regret it.”
I still hadn’t moved.
“You’re the police officer here,” he said. “It should be me who is nervous.”
I felt vaguely embarrassed and downed the rest of my beer before getting up. As I gestured for him to lead the way, I noticed again how much taller I was. On our way to the kitchen, we passed two private tatami rooms, each being busily prepared by the staff for the swarm of guests out front. Foolishly or not, the presence of so many people eased my mind.
The kitchen was staffed by Mexicans and Asians, all in white uniforms. No one paid us any attention as we walked to the back, toward a door marked OFFICE. Junior unlocked it, and once we stepped inside he relocked it. He approached an enormous, door-size oil painting of a geisha walking up a dark flight of stairs. There was a clock on the wall beside it, which he set to midnight, then he turned the minute hand three revolutions clockwise and two revolutions counterclockwise. The painting slowly swung open from the wall like a door, revealing a passageway and a dark descending staircase. He walked down and with a glance over his shoulder said, “It will close again in ten seconds.”
Visions of my own doom flittered through my head, but at that point I’d already talked myself into following. If he wanted to lure me into danger, he wouldn’t be this obvious about it, even if he figured me for a complete idiot. The kid seemed too smart to underestimate a cop. He really wanted to show me something, and I wasn’t ready yet to walk away.
We reached a long dim hallway and passed six closed doors, each with a keypad over the knob. At the end we stopped at a door that was set much farther away from the others. He punched a series of numbers on the keypad and something clicked. He pushed the door open completely before walking inside.
I heard soft oriental music. The room glowed bluish and shimmered.
It was no more than eight hundred square feet but felt cavernous, with a lofty ceiling and walls of glass surrounding us, behind them water and fish. I had entered a gigantic aquarium. The three walls before me each showed the flush faces of four separate tanks, framed in quadrants like giant television monitors, their blue-lit waters filled with stingrays and sharks and what looked like piranha and other menacing fish, swimming around beds of coral and white gravel. High above me were two ceiling fans, their slow synchronous spinning like the gears of a machine. I noticed then the small video camera perched in the corner, peering down at us.
On a large oriental rug in the center of the room stood a black leather couch, two dolphin chairs, and a glass coffee table. Sonny Jr. walked to the table and took a cigarette from the pack lying there, lit it casually, and approached the tank of stingrays.
I sensed something behind me. Haunting the hallway outside, in his oversize bib of an apron, was the seven-foot Mexican, his dull Frankenstein face looming beyond the top of the doorframe, nearly severed by it. Junior spoke Vietnamese to him and he stepped inside, bowing to do so, and propelled me farther into the room until I was standing by the black couch. He untied his apron and let it wilt onto the floor, then closed the door behind him.