He sighed. “I’m going to have to move again. Can’t have them knowing where I live.”
“Don’t forget, they also know where you work.”
“I don’t care about that. A lot of what I do now, I do remotely. On the days where I have to go to and from the office, I’ll run an extra-careful SDR.”
“You haven’t been doing that already?”
“Sorry. Not as much as I should be. But believe me, I’m careful when I go to see you.”
This was an unavoidable problem. Inside computer networks, Harry was pure stealth. But in the real world, he was mostly a civilian. A weak spot in my armor.
I shrugged. “If you weren’t, those guys would have gotten to me by now. Maybe at Teize, maybe another time. Your moves shook them off.”
He brightened a little at that, then said, “You don’t think I’m in any danger, do you?”
I thought about it. I hadn’t mentioned that Kanezaki’s partner hadn’t survived our meeting. I told him now.
“Shit,” he said. “That’s what I’m talking about. What if they want payback?”
“I don’t think they’d look to extract it from you. If this were a yakuza thing, it might be a different story, they might come after my friends just to hurt me. But here, if they’ve got a beef, it’s with me. You’re no threat to them. Besides, they don’t have much in-house muscle. Congress wouldn’t like it. That’s why they need people like me.”
“What about the police? A taxi picked me up at the same spot where someone is going to find a body.”
“Kanezaki will make a few calls and that body will be gone before anyone stumbles across it. And even if the cops were to get involved, what do they have? Even if they found a way to contact the cabdriver, all he’s got is a fake name and an average-looking guy he barely saw in the dark, right?”
“I guess that’s true.”
“But you still have to be cautious,” I said. “This girl you’re involved with, Yukiko, you trust her?”
He looked at me. After a moment, he nodded.
“Because, if you’re spending the night with this girl, she knows where you live. That’s a weakness in your defenses right there.”
“Yeah, but she’s not involved with these people…”
“You never know, Harry. You never really know.”
There was a long pause, then he said, “I can’t live that way. The way you do.”
A thought flashed in my mind: Maybe you should have figured that out before you got involved in my world.
But that wasn’t fair. Or particularly useful.
The waitress brought two demitasses of the Nire Blend and set them down with exquisite care, as though they were priceless artifacts. She bowed and moved away.
We drank the coffee. Harry said positive things about his, but there was some obvious effort behind this. It used to be that he would delight in mocking my gustatory recommendations. I couldn’t help noticing the contrast, and I didn’t care for it.
We made small talk. When the coffee was done, we said good night, and I left him to make my circuitous way back to the hotel.
I wondered if I really believed that the Agency posed little danger to Harry. I supposed that mostly I did. Whether they posed a danger to me was another story. They might have wanted me for help, as Kanezaki had said. Or they might have been looking for payback for Holtzer. I had no way to be sure. Regardless, eliminating Kanezaki’s escort earlier wasn’t exactly going to engender endearment.
And there was Yukiko. She still didn’t feel right to me, and I had no way of knowing whether she was hooked up with the Agency or with someone else.
Back at the hotel, I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, again unable to sleep.
So it wasn’t Midori, after all, I thought.
The Agency instead of Midori. Talk about a fucking consolation prize.
Enough. Let it go.
I was suddenly less certain than I had been the night before that this would be my last in Tokyo. I stared at the ceiling for a long time before descending into sleep.
6
THE NEXT MORNING I took the bullet train back to Osaka. Arriving early in the afternoon at bustling Shin-Osaka station, I was surprised to find that it felt good to be back. Maybe I’d gotten tired of living in hotels. Or maybe it was something about knowing that I was going to have to leave again, this time permanently.
I knew I’d been clean when I left Tokyo, but the two-and-a-half-hour train ride had afforded me no new opportunities to check my back. That’s a long time for me, especially given my recent run-in with Kanezaki and company, and to ease my discomfort I took an appropriately circuitous route before catching a Tanimachi line train to Miyakojima, where I took the stairs of the A4 exit to the street.
For no particular reason I made a left around the police box at the Miyakojima Hon-dori intersection, maneuvering around the hundreds of commuter bicycles jammed in all directions around the exit. I could as easily have made a right, past the local high school and toward the Okawa River. One of the things that had attracted me to the high-rise in Belfa is that the complex is approachable from all directions.
I took a left at Miyakojima Kita-dori, then a right against traffic down a one-way street, then another left. The move against traffic would impede anyone’s attempts at vehicular surveillance. And each turn gave me an opportunity to unobtrusively glance behind me while putting me on a narrower, quieter road than the last. Anyone hoping to follow me on foot would have to stay close or lose me. There were dozens of high-rises in the area, too, and the fact that I might have been going to any one of them was another factor that would have rendered ineffective anything other than close-range surveillance.
In some ways the neighborhood was the poster child for bad zoning. There were shiny glass-and-steel condominiums across from corrugated and I-beam parking garages. Single-family homes perched alongside recycling plants and foundries. A new multistory school turned its proud granite façade away from its neighbor, a dilapidated relic of a car repair shop, like an ungrateful child ashamed of an ailing parent.
On the other hand, the residents didn’t seem to mind the shambles. On the contrary: everywhere were small signs of the pride the locals took in their dwellings. The monotonous macadam and corrugated metal were relieved by small riots of potted bamboo, lavender, and sunflowers. Here was a carefully arranged cairn of volcanic rocks, there, a display of dried coral. One house had concealed what would have been an ugly ferroconcrete wall with a lovingly tended garden of angel’s trumpet, sage, and lavender.
I lived on the thirty-sixth floor of one of the twin high-rises in the Belfa complex, in a three-bedroom corner apartment. The place was larger than I needed and most of the rooms went unused, but I liked living on the top floor, with a view of the city, above it all. Also, at the time I’d rented it, I thought it would be to my advantage to take a place that didn’t fit the profile of what a lone man, recently disappeared and with minimal needs, would take for an apartment. In the end, of course, it hadn’t mattered.
I tell myself that I like to live in places like Belfa because parents are inherently watchful of strangers, and once they decide you belong they can form an unconscious but effective obstacle to an ambush. But I know there’s more to it than that. I don’t have a family and never will, and I’m probably drawn to such environments not just for operational security but for some other, more vicarious form of security, as well. There was a time when I didn’t seem to need such things, when I would have been amused and perhaps even vaguely disgusted at the notion of living like some sort of psychic vampire, a lingering revenant pressed up against one-way glass, looking with forlorn and futile eyes at the ordinary life that fate had denied him.