The train continued along at its leisurely pace, chunk-chunk, chunk-chunk, settling into stations along the way, waiting for passengers to board and depart, easing forward again with its musical chin-chin. I was the only passenger to get off at Zōshigaya. I waited until the train had pulled away, then walked across the tracks. Across from me, on the other side of a sleepy, narrow street, was the cemetery. But for a profusion of markers sprouting up from the moss-covered earth, it might have been a small forest planted in the midst of the city around it.
I entered along the northwest path, then stopped. Insects buzzed around me and there was a slight rustling of tree leaves. Other than that, everything was completely still. And yet, something didn’t feel right. This was where McGraw had told me to meet him, but I realized there was no reason I had to approach from this angle, which is what he would have been expecting. I could as easily have approached through the cemetery from the opposite direction, or from any direction at all.
I shook off the feeling, thinking it must have been the sudden splash of green, the sound of unseen insects, that was triggering combat reflexes shaped in the jungle. McGraw had no reason to set me up. I was just being paranoid. Still, no downside to coming in along a less obvious route. I started to back up, but then saw McGraw, strolling along one of the east — west paths to my right, a map in one hand and a camera in the other. He looked like nothing more than a foreign tourist on an outing. Which I supposed was exactly the point. He nodded his head at me and walked over. Yeah, I was being paranoid. All right.
I had to admit, I was impressed by the choice of venue. I didn’t think many foreigners living in Tokyo even knew about Zōshigaya. It was about as off the beaten track as you could reasonably get inside the Yamanote.
“You know your way around Tokyo pretty well,” I said, as he approached.
He stopped in front of me and mopped his ruddy brow with a handkerchief. “Son, I’d have to be a piss-poor case officer not to know the local terrain well enough to exploit it.”
Christ, he was an ornery prick. “I just meant you’re not from around here. I don’t think many foreigners know Zōshigaya.”
He glanced at the bag I was carrying. “And you do?”
I thought of my mother. “I grew up here, remember?” I didn’t see the need to share any details beyond that.
“Yeah, I guess you did.”
I looked at the camera. “So if someone stops you, you’re, what, taking pictures?”
“Are you going to teach me about cover for action now, son? You think the map and the camera are all I’ve got? I’ve been using the camera, it’s not just a prop. So yes, if anyone asks, I’m making a pilgrimage to the graves of some of the famous people buried here. Lafcadio Hearn in particular. I’ve got the photos to back it up. From here and from some of the other cemeteries in Tokyo — Aoyama, Yanaka, you name it. The cemeteries of Tokyo are a hobby of mine, in fact, you get it? You want a cover to work, you have to live it.”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t deny, he was good at what he did.
“You satisfied?” he said. “You want me to run the same kind of test on you? Let me guess, you just came out here for the fresh air, is that it? You better hope that’s enough on the day someone really probes your cover. Christ, I wish you’d shape up. I don’t think you know what tradecraft even is.”
I felt my anger kicking in. “Yeah? Why don’t you teach me?”
“What do you call what I just did?”
I stood there, stung and smoldering. He was right. What I would have called it was an insult, but it was also, undeniably, a lesson. It was up to me which part to focus on.
I shrugged it off. “Where’s the information?”
“Not here. I’m not giving it to you directly.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not going to get caught handing over classified U.S. government information that could be used to prove I conspired to commit a murder. Call it my ‘don’t spend your retirement in jail’ plan.”
“I guess that’s a good reason.”
“It is. I’m glad one of us knows what tradecraft is.”
I shrugged that one off, too. “Where do I retrieve it?”
“You know Shibuya Lion?”
“I know Shibuya, but I don’t know a lion.”
“It’s a coffee shop to the right of Dogenzaka as you walk up from the JR station. Been there for about twenty years. Longer, if you include the previous incarnation, which was destroyed during the war but rebuilt to the same design. You can find it in the yellow pages. Go to the second floor, and sit in the fourth booth from the front alongside the windows.”
“What if that booth is taken?”
“Then you’ll sit somewhere else and wait until it’s open. But it probably won’t be taken.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll find an envelope taped to the bottom of the seat. Do I need to tell you to read it, memorize it, and then fucking burn it?”
“I guess you just did.”
“I’ll say this for you, son. You may not be fast, but you’re not ineducable, either.”
“I’m glad to know there’s hope.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far. Let’s see how things turn out with Ozawa.”
CHAPTER TEN
I made my way to Shibuya, and from there to the place McGraw had described. It was at the top of a hill snaking off Dogenzaka, the main artery leading from the station, an incongruous little building with arched doors and windows, a red and blue tiled roof, and a makeshift garden of potted plants lined up at its base. I parked Thanatos, scoped the area on foot, and, finding nothing out of place, went inside.
What I discovered surprised me: a space more akin to a cathedral than to a coffee shop. The ceiling was low in back but open to a soaring second floor at the opposite end; the walls were lined with red velvet booths that might have been pews; and at the front, elevated on a pulpit and rising all the way to the second floor, stood a pair of massive and ancient-looking wooden speakers from which issued an organ piece I recognized from the classical music my father had favored — Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. The sudden organ music would have been unsettling in its own right, but combined with the overall decor, it was downright spooky. I wondered for a moment if fate weren’t having some fun with me just then, first with the reminders of my parents, and then with the graveyards and churchlike buildings — all portents, perhaps, of a direction I was traveling that was less a thoroughfare and more a one-way street.
There were some flyers by the door — a local yakitori place; some sort of live theater; a guy named Terumasa Hino playing trumpet at a jazz club called Taro in Shinjuku. I guessed the various establishments in question paid Lion a fee for the privilege of advertising there, hoping coffee aficionados would also be attuned to yakitori and live theater and jazz.
I stepped inside and looked around. The light was low, mostly what was seeping through the opaque glass along one wall, but also provided by a few dim wall sconces and a glass chandelier up front. The air was redolent of decades of coffee and tobacco. Most strikingly of all, there was no conversation — the dozen or so customers, men and women of varying ages and attire, each sat silently, some reading, some sleeping, some swaying in slow rapture in time with the music. Other than the dramatic notes of Bach’s organ piece, the room was utterly silent. I had the impression that whatever dust had collected here on the curves of the dark wooden pillars and among the stacks of hundreds of albums had lain undisturbed for decades.