At eleven o’clock that night, about an hour before the trains stopped for the evening, I got on an Asakusa-bound Ginza-line train at Shibuya Station. I boarded a car at the front and stood on the left, the side with a view of the opposite platform. As we pulled into Gaienmae Station and slowed to a stop, I got a complete view of the Shibuya-bound platform. There were a handful of late-night office workers waiting for a train, but no one who rubbed me the wrong way. I noted each of them carefully. If anyone I saw now was still standing on the platform when I returned, I would know I had a problem.
At Aoyama-itchōme, one stop farther down the line, I got off and waited for a train in the other direction. I didn’t have to wait long: even off peak, Ginza-line trains ran every three minutes. I got on, this time near the back. As we approached Gaienmae Station, I pulled the surgical mask up over my nose and mouth. Japan is a remarkably considerate society, and it was common for people suffering from head colds to wear the cloth masks to reduce the spread of germs. Happily, the masks have other uses, too. Between the hat, the sunglasses, the mask, and the coat, I was confident even someone who knew me as well as Miyamoto did wouldn’t recognize me. And if someone managed to snap a photo, that would be useless to them, too.
The train eased to a stop. I got off quickly and started walking down the platform toward the Number Three exit. Everyone I could see who had been waiting on the platform got on the train. The twenty or so people who got off started heading toward various exits. Everything looked copacetic.
I continued along the platform. The train started pulling away. No one lingered. When the train was gone, I checked the platform on the other side of the tracks. There were a dozen or so people there, but I had seen none of them when I had passed through a few minutes earlier.
I came to the benches I had described to Miyamoto. I sat on the last of them and looked around. No one was within view on my side of the tracks. On the other side, two salarymen were walking down the platform, neckties loosened, laughing about something or other. They didn’t even glance my way. This was the moment. I reached around to the back of the chair and felt an envelope. I gripped one side and pulled. There was the sound of adhesive giving way, and then it was in my hand, two inches thick and wrapped in heavy tape. I shoved it into my bag and headed out. I passed several people and a station guard on the way, but if any of them wondered why Halloween seemed to have come early to Tokyo, none gave any sign. I left the station and, when I was satisfied I wasn’t being followed, found a public restroom and checked the contents of the envelope. The money was all there — five thousand dollars, a fortune to me at the time. And there was a file on a guy named Mori, which I’d review later. I called Miyamoto and, disguising my voice again, told him I’d picked up the package and that I’d be in touch soon.
I got on Thanatos and headed to Ueno, where I checked into a cheap business hotel. I wanted to see Sayaka, of course, but it wouldn’t do to have her see me coming and going in the middle of the night. I didn’t want to have to explain myself, and I didn’t want her to be more concerned or suspicious than she already was about what kind of trouble I might be in. Weirdly, I wondered if she would think of me. Probably I was being stupid. Probably she wouldn’t even notice that I had spent the night somewhere else. If something didn’t go right, if I got spotted by Mad Dog or one of the other yakuza trying to collect on the contract, she might wonder about me once or twice, and then probably never think of me again.
And nor, I realized, would anyone else. Unmoored, on the run, in a dim room in a grubby business hotel, and I had to realize something like that. I wondered how I had reached this point.
I didn’t have an answer.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
While I waited for the hour to grow sufficiently late, I reviewed the file on Mori. For whatever reason, I’d been expecting an older guy, but Mori was only thirty-five. He cut a handsome figure, favoring Italian suits and slicking his hair back like a movie star, and had a reputation as a ladies’ man. He’d been promoted unusually fast within MITI, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, these days known as METI, the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. But apparently not fast enough. The impression I got from reading the file was of a guy impressed with himself and disdainful of his superiors, a guy who didn’t want to wait in line for the power and prestige he felt he deserved. I didn’t blame him for threatening his bosses as a way to get what he wanted. But I didn’t blame the people who’d decided he should take early retirement, either.
Apparently, he was a karaoke enthusiast, his singing talents nearly those of a professional. He liked to entertain business and political associates at a hostess bar called Higashi West, in Akasaka, one of Tokyo’s high-end entertainment districts. Higashi is the Japanese word for “east,” so the club’s name meant East West, presumably a reference to the composition of its hostesses, many of whom were from Europe. A decade or so later, gaijin hostesses would be a common theme in Tokyo, but at the time having them on staff was still noteworthy. Many Japanese men were both fascinated and intimidated by foreign women, and apparently Mori believed that mixing with them was a sign of his taste, confidence, and sophistication. Maybe he had a point. I didn’t know — at that age, all women were fundamentally a mystery to me, regardless of where they came from.
I thought about how I would handle him. A gun would be the most obvious choice, but where was I going to get one in severely gun-controlled Japan? McGraw might be able to procure something, I supposed, but being the careful man he obviously was, he probably wouldn’t do it. Too loud. Too much ballistics evidence. Too much possibility it could be traced back to him.
A knife would be the next thing the average person would think of. But a knife involved potential drawbacks, too. I knew from unpleasant combat experience that except in the movies, people rarely die quickly or quietly when they’re killed with a knife. A single well-placed stab to, say, the femoral artery might work — just hit it and keep walking — but if you miss your mark, then all you’ve accomplished for the enormous risk you just took is to alert the target that he’s a marked man. If you want to be sure, you have to stab the target repeatedly and then sit on him while he screams and thrashes and bleeds and dies. You can try to avoid a long and noisy drama by cutting through the trachea and carotid, of course, as I was taught to do in the military, but it takes a hell of a lot of luck with a cut like that not to get a Mount Vesuvius of blood all over you. Not an easy thing to wear inconspicuously in crowded Tokyo. And it’s not just the appearance of being covered in blood that’s a problem. That much blood smells, and people know what the smell is even if they’ve never smelled it before.
But the ladies’ man part of the file…that was interesting. I thought I could make that fit with something other than a knife or a gun. After all, a guy who slept around indiscriminately might have a lot of enemies. If I did it right, I could create something that to the police would seem personal, not professional. There was already a narrative…maybe if I created a few facts consistent with that narrative, it would distract investigators from coming up with an alternative — and in this case more accurate — theory.
Was my analysis cold-blooded? I supposed it was. But with sufficient exposure, you get acclimated to anything, killing included. If you’ve never had that exposure, survived those conditions, lived in those environments, I imagine a clinical approach to killing seems like a horror. But after what I’d seen — and done — in the jungle, it just felt sensible. Even normal. There was a problem I needed to solve, and I wanted to solve it in the safest, most efficient way I could. I thought that was all that mattered.