I varied my mornings and evenings training at Gracie Barra, jujitsu’s modern Mecca, where the fecund Gracie family had taken the teachings of a visiting Japanese diplomat and adapted them into a system of ground fighting so sophisticated that the art is now more firmly established in Brazil than it ever was in Japan. I trained frequently and hard, having missed the opportunity to do so during the year I had spent underground in Osaka and in São Paulo thereafter. The academy’s young black belts were impressed with my skills, but in truth their ground game was stronger than mine-although certainly less ruthless, if applied in the real world-and I relished the opportunity to once again polish and expand my personal arsenal.
In the afternoons I would ride an old ten-speed out to one of the city’s more isolated beaches-sometimes Grumari, sometimes even less accessible slivers of sand, which I reached on foot, where only the most determined surfers, and perhaps some nude sunbathers, might venture. After a month my skin had become dark, like that of a true carioca, or Rio native, and my hair, brown like my mother’s now that I no longer dyed it black to make myself look more Japanese, grew streaked like a surfer’s.
Sometimes I would swim out to one of the nearby islands. I would sit on those deserted outcroppings of gray and green and consider the rhythm of waves against rock, the occasional sighing of the wind, and my mind would wander. I would think of Midori, the jazz pianist I had accidentally met and then deliberately spared after killing her father, a man whose posthumous wishes I had tried to carry out later, an effort that had perhaps earned ambivalence, but that could never lead to forgiveness, from the daughter. I would remember how on that last night she had leaned in from astride me and whispered I hate you even as she came, the newly acquired certainty of what I had done to her father damning the passion she otherwise couldn’t prevent, and I would wonder foolishly if she might ever play in one of Rio’s jazz clubs. And I would look back on my new city and see it as an island, not unlike the one from which I viewed it: a beautiful place, to be sure, but still one of exile, sometimes of regret, ultimately of loneliness.
I kept the apartment in São Paulo. I took care to travel there from time to time to maintain appearances, and managed Yamada’s new export operation remotely, mostly by e-mail. Some simple commercial software turned the lights on and off at random intervals during preset hours so that it looked as though someone was living there, and so that the electric bills would be consistent with full-time residency. A faucet opened to a continual slow drip accomplished the same end with regard to water bills. In addition, I stayed from time to time in various short-term hotel/apartments elsewhere in Rio, adding a certain shell game dynamic to the other challenges a pursuer might face in attempting to locate me.
But all this security cost money, and, although I had saved a good deal over the years, my means were not unlimited, and what I did have was kept in a variety of anonymous offshore accounts that effectively paid no interest. Dividend-paying stocks and IRAs and 401(k)s weren’t part of the plan. I told myself that after a couple of years, or a few, when the trail someone might try to follow had grown cold, and their potential motivations sufficiently remote, I might be able to scale back on some of the precautions that posed such a burden to my finances.
Time passed. And, much as I enjoyed it, Rio came to feel like a way station, not a destination; a breather, not the end of the march. There was an aimlessness to my days there, an aimlessness that my focus on jujitsu alleviated but didn’t dispel. From time to time I would remember Tatsu telling me you can’t retire, spoken with equal parts confidence and sadness, and those words, which I had first taken to be a threat and then understood to be merely a prediction, came in my memory to bear the weight of something else, something more akin to prophecy.
I grew restless, and my restlessness proved fertile ground for memories of Naomi. The way she had whispered come inside in my ear on that first long night together. The way she would slip into Portuguese when we made love. The way she had offered to try to help Harry, who had been not just an asset of mine, but a rare friend, an offer that had been as sincere as it was ultimately useless. And the way I had promised her the last time I saw her that I would find her in Brazil, that I wouldn’t leave her waiting and wondering what had ever happened to me.
The way you did Midori.
I’ve paid for that one, thank you.
It had been good with Naomi, that was the thing. Warm and sweet and emotionally uncomplicated. It wasn’t what I had with Midori, or almost had, but I was never going to have that again and preferred to spend as little time as possible flagellating myself over it. Going to her would be selfish, I knew, because in Tokyo our involvement had almost gotten her killed, and, despite the change of venue and all my new precautions, it was far from impossible that something like that could happen again. But I found myself thinking of her all the time, wondering if somehow it could work. Japan was far away. I was Yamada now, wasn’t I? And Naomi was whoever she was in Brazil. We could start over, start afresh.
I should have known better. But we all have stupid moments, rationalization, even blindness, born of weakness and human need.
Naomi’s Japanese mother had died many years earlier, but she had told me her father’s name, David Leonardo Nascimento, and had let me know that I could find him in Salvador. Nascimento is a common name in Brazil, but there was no Leonardo, David, in the Salvador white pages, to which I had access via a Rio public library. An Internet search proved more productive: David Leonardo Nascimento, it seemed, was the president of a Salvador-based company with real estate, construction, and manufacturing interests.
I could have simply called and asked how I might get in touch with Naomi, but I didn’t want too long a gap between the time when I contacted her and the time when we might actually meet. I told myself that this preference was logical, the outgrowth of my usual security concerns, but I knew at some level that it was driven also by personal factors. I didn’t want to have to catch up over the phone, to answer questions about where I was and what I was doing, to explain my long delay in tracking her down. Better to get it all out of the way in person.
Salvador was a two-hour flight from Rio, and in making my way through this new city I was struck, as always when traversing colossal Brazil, by the contrasts among the land’s regions. Salvador, nearer the equator, was hotter than Rio, the air somehow richer, moister. In Rio, the ubiquitous granite cliffs seem to offer glimpses of the land’s strong skeleton; in Salvador, everywhere there was red earth, more akin to a soft covering of skin. And the people were darker-hued: a reflection of the area’s African heritage, which revealed itself also in the baroque carving of the town’s colonial churches; in the blood-pounding beat of its candomblé music; in the flowing, dancing moves of its capoeiristas, with their hypnotizing mixture of dance, fighting, and gymnastics, all set to the tune of the stringed berimbau and the mesmerizing beat of the conga.
Nascimento was well buffered by secretaries, and there was a fair amount of back and forth before I was able to actually get ahold of him. When I did, he told me that Naomi had left word with him about a friend from Japan, someone named John, but that this had been some time ago. I acknowledged the delay and waited, and after a moment he told me that his daughter was living in Rio, working at a bar called Scenarium, on the Rua do Lavradio. He gave me a phone number. I thanked him and went straight to the airport, smiling at the irony. All these months of avoiding Salvador, only to learn that Naomi and I were living practically as neighbors.