“How about you?” I said. “Did you…are you in college?”
She frowned, but with a hint of amusement. “Don’t you have anything better to do than hang around here talking to me?”
“Not really. I mean, yes, but…”
She looked at me with an expression that could probably best be described as “charitable.”
“Do you like jazz?” I asked, flailing.
“What gave you that idea?”
“Well, you’re always listening to it on that tape recorder.”
“I was being sarcastic.”
I realized I should have quit while I was ahead. “Okay,” I said, “I guess I should go.”
“Okay.”
“Maybe I’ll see you later.”
“Maybe.”
“Bye.”
She gave me a tiny wave, half friendly, half dismissal, from behind the glass.
I headed south on Thanatos for a while, going nowhere in particular, nursing my wounded dignity. Then I shrugged it off and started to focus. I stopped at a payphone and called my answering service, hoping I’d have some word from McGraw. Instead, the woman on the morning shift told me, “You have a message from a Miyamoto-san. He asks that you call him back.”
Miyamoto? I wondered why he was contacting me. We’d had coffee together a few times — Miyamoto was talkative for a courier, and though I recognized social contact would at best be frowned upon by the people we worked for, I was too green to know I should rebuff him. He was friendly and inquisitive, unabashed about asking questions that were uncharacteristically direct for a Japanese: how was it to grow up in both countries, what was life like in the American army, had it been uncomfortable for me to fight in a western war against Asians, things like that. I liked that he took an interest, and that his questions were tinged with sympathy rather than judgment. He himself had fought with the Imperial Army in the Philippines, and though he claimed not to have distinguished himself, I sensed he was being modest. All soldiers are liars: either they exaggerate, or they downplay. I’d asked him what the hell he was doing carrying a bag at his age. He’d laughed and told me that as a younger man he’d foolishly made an enemy, and that this enemy, as chance would have it, had risen to prominence among the people with whom Miyamoto worked. The menial job was supposed to be an ongoing humiliation, but Miyamoto professed not to care. He loved Tokyo, he said, loved watching it change, the seasons along with the skyline. And the walking was good for him. Life was strange, and if it was his karma to be a courier for someone else’s cash, why should he complain?
I considered. The call might have been routine — a cancellation, change of venue, some logistical thing like that. Or maybe he just felt like exchanging pleasantries over coffee again with his fellow bagman. But given everything else going on, I couldn’t help feeling suspicious.
I made my way to another payphone and dialed. “Hai, Miyamoto desu,” the voice on the other end said. Yes, this is Miyamoto.
“It’s Rain,” I said in Japanese.
“Ah. Thank you for getting back to me so quickly.”
“What’s going on?”
There was a pause. “I would prefer if we could speak in person. Perhaps…coffee?”
A few days earlier, I would have met him without another thought. But now, I wasn’t sure. Playing for time, I said, “Where? When?”
“Wherever you would like. Now, if that’s convenient.”
That he was willing to leave the location to me was mildly reassuring. Still, what did I really know about this guy? He might be yakuza himself, and maybe he was contacting me for this “meeting” on behalf of Fukumoto & Sons, Inc.
But I realized also that I had no good way to avoid him. Not if I wanted to keep my job. Once a week or so, he and I had to meet to exchange our bags. Which meant that, if Miyamoto were part of a setup, they could ambush me pretty much anytime I went to see him.
Which was itself mildly reassuring. Why go to the trouble of calling a meeting now, when there would be one in due course soon enough? Why take a chance on alerting me with something out of the ordinary?
Besides, he might have useful information. Maybe I was rationalizing, but on balance I thought the risks were worth it.
“I can meet now,” I said, trying to think of the safest place possible just in case. “Where are you?”
“Shinjuku.”
“I can probably be there in twenty minutes. Let me call you again and I’ll tell you where.”
“All right. That’s fine. Thank you.”
He sounded uncertain. Maybe he was bewildered by why I wouldn’t name the place until later. That was also mildly reassuring — if he’d been too smooth about my reticence, I would have assumed he had reason to expect I might be nervous. As it was, so far he just seemed oblivious.
Still, I wasn’t going to take any chances.
I rode Thanatos to Shinbashi, a business district in the southeast of the city. I called Miyamoto again from a payphone just outside the JR station. “Sorry,” I told him. “I don’t think I can make it to Shinjuku. How soon can you meet me in Shinbashi?”
“Shinbashi? Well, I could be there in a half hour.”
“You know that row of banks — Taiyō and the Bank of Tokyo and Fuji? On Sotobori-dōri, with the view of the Kasumigaseki Building?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll meet you in the lobby of the Taiyō Bank in thirty minutes.”
He hung up without objecting to my unusual suggestion of a meeting place. Maybe he thought I had something to take care of at the bank and was killing two birds with one stone. I didn’t really think he was trying to set me up, and being so cautious felt a bit unreal to me. In the jungle, it had become second nature, but just as it had been at my apartment, here all the environmental cues were different. This was the city. Glass and concrete and lights; suits and cars and restaurants. Not the jungle. Not a war.
And then I thought of Pig Eyes at the Kodokan. The way his face had twisted into a smile as he tightened that strangle.
Tokyo was a jungle. Hell, the world was a jungle. And I damn well needed to remember it before someone else decided to remind me.
I walked the short distance to Taiyō Bank, these days known as Sumitomo Mitsui. There were six lanes of traffic across Sotobori-dōri and the area was bustling, but the uninterrupted clusters of buildings on either side of the street were all still low, no more than ten stories each and usually fewer, the sky wide overhead, the overall feel that of a medium-sized older city rather than a modern metropolis. But the Kasumigaseki Building, dominating the skyline to the west, made it impossible to miss that Tokyo was growing now, and growing almost impossibly fast. At thirty stories, the otherwise unremarkable structure had been Japan’s tallest building when it was completed four years earlier, but it had held that title for only two years, the Tokyo World Trade Center surpassing it in 1970. Then the World Trade Center itself had quickly been eclipsed, by the Keio Plaza Hotel in 1971. Two more skyscrapers — the Shinjuku Sumitomo Building and the Shinjuku Mitsui Building — were already under way, each set to take its brief turn as the new titleholder upon completion, and on and on and on. And for every one of these record breakers, there were scores of other monoliths sprouting freakishly skyward all over the city. At that moment, Tokyo felt to me like a city still clinging to the vestiges of its childhood, and inexorably losing its grip. The city I remembered was receding rapidly, driven off by forces it couldn’t understand, heading to oblivion, to be replaced by what I didn’t know.
I had selected the bank for our meeting because I figured the street’s heavy financial presence, with its concomitant guards and related security measures, would dissuade anyone who might have been planning anything untoward. But I decided not to wait inside. That’s where I was expected, and I thought I’d do better to watch the entrance from a discreet distance, to make sure Miyamoto came alone. So I browsed among the storefronts at the opposite side of the street, lurking under the shadows of awnings to make myself less visible and to evade the murderous midmorning sun.