I made my way across the back and up a steep, creaky set of wooden stairs, pausing at the top to look around. The atmosphere and decor were much the same on high as they were below, with another half-dozen customers silently enjoying their respite and reverie. Most were occupying the center booths, perhaps because they favored the acoustics in the middle of the room. I realized McGraw must have been aware of this tendency among the clientele, and chosen for the dead drop a booth less likely to be occupied. I didn’t like him, but I had to acknowledge once again that he was a good case officer.
I sat in the booth McGraw had described, and waited a moment. An unsmiling waitress wearing an apron over her jeans came over and silently placed a laminated menu the size of a post card on the small wooden table in front of me. The paper inside the laminate was yellowed and stained, and I realized that Lion’s scant offerings — essentially coffee, tea, and milk, hot and cold — had probably remained unchanged since more or less the beginning of time. I pointed to the entry for coffee. The waitress nodded, collected the menu, and moved off. As she did so, I noticed that the varnish on the table was so worn the wood was practically bare. I looked around and saw a similar effect everywhere else — the floor, the seat backs, even the wood around the window hasps — and I felt a sudden and surprising surge of affection for the place. In a dozen small ways, Lion indicated it didn’t give a damn how or how fast Tokyo might be changing outside. It didn’t give a damn about Tokyo, period. This place had found the right way of doing things, and it would keep on doing them without regard to fad or fashion.
The waitress returned in less than three minutes, carefully arranged before me a small white cup of exceptionally dark coffee, an even smaller bowl of sugar, and cream in a silver cup the size of a thimble. The bill went next to it all, for whenever I was ready, and then the waitress was gone, once again without a word. Her reticence didn’t feel unfriendly, though; it was more like there was an understanding here, a mutual comprehension, alongside which words would be superfluous and perhaps even rude.
I reached under the seat and touched paper taped exactly where McGraw had said it would be. But I felt no particular hurry about retrieving and opening it. Instead, I closed my eyes, listened to the music, and began sipping the coffee. It was ungodly strong but also delicious, and I realized someone had employed a lot of care to impart that much richness without bitterness or anything else creeping in to overpower the flavor. I had been expecting just a routine cup of coffee, and was struck by the notion that even in an everyday thing like coffee preparation, there was a way of doing things right, with care and maybe even devotion. Maybe this was part of what Miyamoto had been trying to describe as we had taken our tea at Nakajima. I wasn’t unfamiliar with what it meant to be ruthlessly squared away — ask any combat veteran about the care that goes into planning, training, weapons maintenance, and everything else on which your life might hang in the balance in the field — but this was different. Lion spoke of devotion brought to bear on small things, everyday things, things that otherwise might have seemed inconsequential or have been overlooked entirely, and like the confidence that characterized the place, I sensed this kind of everyday devotion was also something to which a person might want to aspire.
I pulled loose the envelope, opened it, and removed a file. There was a lot of good information: home and work addresses; known cronies and habits; a half-dozen photos; a brief bio. Married, two grown children. No known vices. He’d been a captain in the Imperial Army. Received a commendation for valor, and a leg wound in Manchuria. But that had been a while back. The man I saw in the photos was now sixty-something, thin and sallow-faced, probably from a lifetime of tobacco. His warrior days were behind him. Along with, soon enough, everything else.
I immediately understood the value of the extra photos McGraw had enclosed. A single shot can be misleading. Seeing the subject from multiple angles, on the other hand, at various times, in different clothes, and in varied surroundings, made a positive ID in person much easier and more certain. You really wouldn’t want to drop some clueless civilian because of an accidental likeness to a single low-resolution surveillance photo.
Looking at the photos was weird. Not because it made me feel queasy. Rather, because it didn’t. I was examining the face of a man I was going to kill, and I was as emotionally involved as if I were doing a crossword puzzle. I wondered about that. Was it because after all that time in the jungle, I had become inured to killing? Was it because no one knew me anymore, no one was watching, I had no one to account to?
What about God?
I laughed at that. My mother had tried to raise me as a Catholic, but war had deracinated whatever meager plantings her efforts had achieved. No God ever would have stood silent spectator to what I saw in Vietnam. To what I did there. Either there was no God, or there was and he didn’t give a damn.
And besides, was the absence of feeling really so strange? Ozawa was part of a corrupt system. You take part in a system like that, you have to realize grievances aren’t going to get aired in court, or worked out in group therapy, or solved with mediation. This guy knew the risks, and he took them. It wasn’t my fault the risk/reward ratio wasn’t going to offer the outcome he’d been hoping for.
It was a rationalization, of course. Even back then, I knew that. Maybe I needed the rationalization, like a shot of booze to get up my courage. The strange thing was, even knowing it was a rationalization didn’t make it less effective.
People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there’s just what you can do, and what you can’t.
Well, I could. And I was going to.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Before leaving Lion, I memorized the Ozawa file, then walked outside and burned it as McGraw had instructed. I briefly considered saving it as leverage in case anything went wrong, but decided there was no point. There was nothing on any of the pages to tie them to McGraw, or to anyone else. I’d come to appreciate how careful McGraw was, and imagined he would have handled everything so as to ensure he left no fingerprints, literal or figurative. The person the file could connect to Ozawa, though, was me. Better to just get rid of it.
I took a long and aimless ride on Thanatos, setting Ozawa aside temporarily and thinking about how to communicate with Miyamoto, instead — mapping out the logistics, creating a coherent cover story, pressure-checking all of it. When I had a plan in place, I parked the bike in Shibuya and rode the Ginza line. It didn’t take me long to find what I wanted — Gaienmae Station would work well enough. I walked up and down the platform, decided how I wanted to handle things, then got back on the train.
When I reemerged in Shibuya, it was late afternoon. There was still time to start my recon on Ozawa. The path to solving my yakuza problem went through him, and I wanted to get started.
According to McGraw’s file, Ozawa lived in Kita-Senju, a neighborhood way out in the northeast on the other side of the Sumida River. I’d actually never been there, never having had a reason to go. Well, I did now. I stopped at a gas stand to fill up Thanatos, then headed over, not sure what I would find, hoping it would be something I could use. Killing a guy was one thing. Making it look natural…I didn’t know how the hell I was going to pull off something like that.
Kita-Senju turned out to be a quiet, unpretentious neighborhood consisting primarily of modest single-family houses interspersed with mom-and-pop shops, doubtless run by couples living over the store. Off the main thoroughfares, the streets were barely wide enough for Thanatos, their narrowness accentuated by the tendency of residents to line the few inches of curb in front of their houses with a variety of potted plants, and to park bicycles in front of those. The houses were of wood or ferroconcrete, some even of corrugated iron, most of them small and clustered closely together, but all well maintained. I liked the neighborhood. There was nothing fancy about it, certainly, but it felt real.