It felt good to be back in Tokyo. I didn’t want to leave.
I walked out of the restaurant, pausing to enjoy the feel of Nishi-Azabu’s cool evening air, my eyes reflexively sweeping the street. A few cars passed, but otherwise it was as quiet as the Aoyama cemetery, brooding and dark, silently beckoning, across from where I stood.
I looked again at the stone steps and imagined myself traversing them. Then I turned left and continued the counterclockwise semicircle I had started earlier that evening.
3
I CALLED HARRY from a public phone on Aoyama-dori. “Are you on a secure line?” he asked, recognizing my voice.
“Reasonably secure. Public phone. Out-of-the-way location.” The location mattered, because governments monitor certain public phones-the ones near embassies and police stations, for example, and those in the lobbies of higher-end hotels, to which the nearby lazy can be counted on to repair for their “private” conversations.
“You’re still in Tokyo,” he said. “Calling from a Minami-Aoyama pay phone.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve got things rigged so that I can see the originating number and location of calls that come in to my apartment. It’s what nine-one-one uses in the States. You can’t block it.”
Harry, I thought, smiling. Despite his SuperNerd clothes and constant case of bedhead, despite being at heart an oversized kid for whom hacking was just a video game, only better, Harry could be dangerous. The random favor I’d done him so many years earlier, when I’d saved his ass from a bunch of drunken marines who were looking for a suitable Japanese victim, had paid a hell of a dividend.
And yet, despite my efforts, he could also be astonishingly naïve. I would never tell anyone the kind of thing he had just told me. You don’t give away an advantage like that.
“The NSA should never have let you go, Harry,” I told him. “You’re a privacy nut’s worst nightmare.”
He laughed, but a little uncertainly. Harry has a hard time knowing when I’m teasing him. “Their loss,” he said. “They had too many rules, anyway. It’s much more fun working for a big-five consulting firm. They’ve got so many other problems, they don’t even bother trying to monitor what I’m up to anymore.”
That was smart of them. They couldn’t have kept up with him, anyway. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nothing really. Just wanted to catch up with you while I could. I had a feeling that, if your business here was done, you might leave soon.”
“I guess you were right.”
“Is it… done?”
Harry has long since figured out what I do, although he also understands that it would be taboo to actually ask. And he must have known what it meant when he had contacted me earlier that evening, at my specific request, to tell me precisely where and when I could find the yakuza.
“It’s done,” I told him.
“Does that mean you won’t be around much longer?”
I smiled, absurdly touched by his hangdog tone. “Not much longer, no. I was going to call you before I left.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I looked at my watch. “In fact, what are you doing right now?”
“Just getting up, actually.”
“Christ, Harry, it’s ten at night.”
“I’ve been keeping some strange hours lately.”
“I believe it. Tell you what. Why don’t we meet for a drink. For you, it can be breakfast.”
“What have you got in mind?”
“Hang on a minute.” I grabbed a copy of the Tokyo Yellow Pages from under the phone, and flipped through the restaurant section until I found the place I was looking for. Then I counted ahead five listings, per our usual code, knowing that Harry would count five backward from whatever I told him. Not that anyone was listening-hell, I couldn’t imagine who could listen, if Harry didn’t want them to-but you don’t take chances. I’d taught him to always use a layered defense. To never assume.
“How about Tip-Top, in Takamatsu-cho,” I said.
“Sure,” he said, and I knew he understood. “Great place.”
“I’ll see you when you get there,” I told him.
I hung up, then pulled a handkerchief out of a pants pocket and wiped down the receiver and the buttons. Old habits die hard.
The place I had in mind was called These Library Lounge, pronounced “Teize” by the locals, a small bar with the feel of a speakeasy nestled on the second floor of an unremarkable building in Nishi-Azabu. Although it inhabits the city’s geographical and psychological center, Teize is suffused by a dreamy sense of detachment, as though the bar is an island secretly pleased to find itself lost in the vast ocean of Tokyo around it. Teize has the kind of atmosphere that quickly seduces talk into murmurs and weariness into languor, peeling away the transient concerns of the day until you might find yourself listening to a poignant Johnny Hodges number like “Just a Memory” the way you listened to it the first time, without filters or preconceptions or the notion that it was something you already knew; or taking a saltwater and iodine sip of one of the Islay malts and realizing that this, this exactly, is the taste for which the distiller must have mouthed a silent prayer as he committed the amber liquid to an oak cask thirty years before; or glancing over at a group of elegantly dressed women seated in one of the bar’s quietly lit alcoves, their faces glowing, not yet lined, their faith that havens like this one exist as if by right reflected in the innocent timbre of their laughter and the carefree cadences of their conversation, and remembering without bitterness what it felt like to think that maybe you could be part of such a world.
It took me less than ten minutes to walk the short distance to the bar. I paused outside, before the exterior stairs leading to the second floor, imagining, as I always do before entering a building, where I might wait if I hoped to ambush someone coming out. The exterior of Teize offered two promising positions, one of which, the entryway of an adjacent building, I especially liked because it was set back from the bar’s entrance in such a way that you wouldn’t see someone lurking there until after you’d reached the bottom of the stairs, when it might be too late for you to do anything about it. Unless, of course, before descending, you took the trouble to lean out over the bar’s front balcony in appreciation of the quiet street scene below, as I had now reminded myself to do.
Satisfied with the security layout outside, I took the stairs to the second floor and walked in. I hadn’t been there in a long time, but the proprietors hadn’t seen fit to change anything, thank God. The lighting was still soft, mostly sconces, floor lamps, and candles. A wooden table that had begun its life as a door before being elevated to its current, considerably higher, purpose. Muted Persian rugs and dark, heavy drapes. The white marble bar, confident but not dominating at the center of the main room, shining quietly beneath an overhead set of track lights. Everywhere there were books: mostly works on design, architecture, and art, but also seemingly whimsical selections such as The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and Uncle Santa.
“Nanmeisama?” the bartender asked me. How many? I held up two fingers. He looked around the room, confirming what I had already noticed, that no tables were available.
“That’s fine,” I told him in Japanese. “I think we’ll just sit at the bar.” Which, in addition to its other advantages, offered a tactical view of the entranceway.
Harry arrived an hour later, as I was beginning my second single malt of the evening, a sixteen-year-old Lagavulin. He saw me as he came in, and smiled.
“John-san, hisashiburi desu ne,” he said. It’s been a long time. Then he switched to English, which would afford us marginally better privacy in these surroundings. “It’s good to see you.”