I pictured her, the long hair, the aloof confidence. She might be taking precautions, after Harry. Murakami might even have warned her to be careful. But she was no hard target. I could get to her. And I thought I knew how.
I went to a spy paraphernalia shop in Shinjuku to buy a few things I would need. What the store offered to the public was almost scary: pinhole cameras and phone taps. Taser guns and tear gas. Diamond-bit drills and lock picks. All available “for academic purposes only,” of course. I contented myself with a Secret Service-style ASP tactical baton, a nasty piece of black steel that collapsed to nine inches and telescoped to twenty-six with a snap of the wrist.
Next stop was a sporting goods store, where I bought a roll of thirty-pound test high-impact monofilament fishing line, white sports tape, gloves, a wool hat, long underwear, and a canvas bag. Third stop, a drugstore for some cheap cologne, a hand towel, and a pack of cigarettes and matches. Next, a local Gap for an unobtrusive change of clothes. Then a novelty shop for a fright wig and a set of rotted false teeth. Finally, a packaging supply house, for a twenty-five-meter roll of translucent packing tape. Shinjuku, I thought, like an advertising jingle. For All Your Shopping Needs.
I holed up in another business hotel, this time in Ueno. I set my watch alarm for midnight and went to sleep.
When the alarm woke me, I slipped the long underwear on under my clothes and secured the baton to my wrist with two lengths of the sports tape. I wet the towel and wrung it out, put it and the other gear I had bought into the canvas bag, and walked out to the station, where I found a pay phone. I still had the card I had taken on my first night at Damask Rose. I called the phone number on it.
A man answered the phone. It might have been Mr. Ruddy, but I wasn’t sure.
“Hai, Damask Rose,” the voice said. I heard J-Pop playing in the background and imagined dancers on the twin stages.
“Hello,” I said, in Japanese, raising my voice slightly to disguise it. “Can you tell me who’s there tonight?”
The voice intoned a half-dozen names. Naomi was among them. So was Yukiko.
“Great,” I said. “Are they all there until three?”
“Hai, so desu.” Yes, they are.
“Great,” I said again. “I’ll see you later.”
I hung up.
I caught a cab to Shibuya, then did a foot SDR to Minami-Aoyama. I remembered Yukiko’s address from the time I had checked out her and Naomi’s backgrounds from Osaka, and I had no trouble finding her apartment building. The main entrance was in front. An underground garage was off to one side, accessible only by a grated metal door controlled by a magnetic card reader in a center island. No other ways in or out.
I thought of her white M3. Assuming that the night I had seen her in it wasn’t an anomaly, it was her commuting vehicle. She wouldn’t be driving it to Harry’s tonight, and Murakami would either be unreachable for the moment or he would have told her to stay away. I judged that there was an excellent possibility that she would be pulling in sometime after three.
I found a nearby building separated from its neighbor by a long, narrow alley. I moved into the shadows there and opened my bag of goodies. I took out the cologne and applied a heavy dose to my nostrils. Then I closed the bag and stashed it there, and walked into nearby Roppongi.
It didn’t take me long to find a homeless man who looked about the right size. He was sitting on a cinder block in the shadows of one of the elevated expressways of Roppongi-dori, next to a cardboard and tarp shelter. He was wearing overlarge brown pants cinched tight with a worn belt, a filthy checked button-down shirt, and a fraying cardigan sweater that two generations earlier might have been red.
I walked over to him. “Fuku o kokan site kurenai ka?” I asked, pointing to my chest. You want to trade clothes?
He looked at me for a long moment as though I was unhinged. “Nandatte?” he asked. What the hell are you talking about?
“I’m serious,” I said in Japanese. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
I shrugged off the nylon windbreaker I was wearing and handed it to him. He took it, his expression briefly incredulous, then wordlessly began to slip out of his rags.
Two minutes later I was wearing his clothes. Even through the heavy layer of cologne, the smell was horrific. I thanked him and headed back to Aoyama.
Back in the alley, I pulled on the fright wig and secured it with the wool hat, then popped in the false teeth. I lit a cigarette and let it burn down, then rubbed a mixture of ashes and spit onto my face. I lit a match and took a quick look at myself in a sawed-off dental mirror I keep on my key chain. I barely recognized what I saw, and I smiled a rotten-toothed smile.
I slipped on the gloves and walked out to the garage entrance of Yukiko’s building. I took the fishing line and translucent tape, but left the bag and the rest of its contents in the alley. There was a security camera mounted just above the grated garage door. I cut a wide path around it, then reapproached from the side farther from the street. The corner of the building jutted out a few centimeters, apparently for aesthetic reasons. I slid down low, using the jutting design for partial concealment. The average person pulling in or out wouldn’t notice me. Anyone who did would assume I was just some homeless man, probably drunk and passed out there. My getup was insurance against the very small chance that someone might call the cops. If anyone did show up to investigate, my appearance and smell would be strong incentive for them to just tell me to be on my way and leave it at that.
It was late, and not too many people were coming or going. After nearly an hour, I heard what I’d been waiting for: a car pulling into the driveway.
I heard it stop in front of the door, the engine idling. I pictured the driver rolling down the window, inserting a magnetic card into the reader. A moment later I heard the mechanical whine of the door rising. I counted ten seconds off before the sound stopped. I heard the car pull in.
The mechanical whine started again. I counted off five seconds, on the assumption that, with the assistance of gravity, the door would drop more quickly than it had risen. Then I darted out from my position, strode down to the door, dropped to my side, and rolled under it.
Lying on my back to keep my profile low, I raised my head and looked around. The structure was shaped like a large rectangle. There was a row of parked cars in front of each of the four walls, and two double rows lengthwise up the middle. The car that had just arrived pulled into a space in one of the middle rows. I rolled to a crouch and, keeping low, ducked behind a nearby car.
The elevators and a door marked “Stairs” were at the far end of the rectangle, opposite the grated doors I had just come through. A woman got out of the car that had come in, walked over to the elevators, and pressed a button. A second later, the doors opened. She went inside and the doors closed behind her.
I looked around. Concrete weight-bearing pillars were spaced every few meters throughout. There were no ramps, so I knew it was only one story. From its size and location, I gathered it was intended only to serve the residents of the building above.
Ideally, I would have gotten to Yukiko just as she left her car. But I had no way of knowing which parking space was hers, and she might easily see me coming if my guess left me too far away. The only choke point was the elevators. I decided to set up there.
I looked around for cameras. The only one I spotted was a large double CCTV installation mounted on the ceiling directly in front of the elevators, one unit facing the elevators, the other monitoring the garage. Except in high security installations, where CCTV is monitored in real time by guards, security cameras typically record to tape that gets recorded over every twenty-four hours unless there’s an incident that makes earlier review worthwhile. In a residential setup like this one, it was a safe bet that no one was watching the garage right now. But they’d sure as hell be reviewing the tapes the next day. I was glad I was disguised the way I was.