We left it at that. He gave me the URL for a secure bulletin board. I called him a few days later on his Japanese cell phone. He was back in Tokyo. He told me Naomi had gotten the money.
I used a pay phone to call her at Scenarium. The club was noisy in the background. She said, “I didn’t want the fucking money. I could have had it, but I didn’t want it.”
“Naomi…” I started to say. I didn’t know what I was going to add. But it didn’t really matter. She had already hung up.
I looked at the phone for a long time, as though the device had somehow betrayed me. Then I put it back in its cradle. Wiped it down automatically. Walked away.
I went to an Internet café and composed a message. The message was brief. The salient part was the number of an offshore account, to which they could transfer the fifty thousand down payment.
I heard laughter and looked up. Some kids at the terminal next to me, playing an online game.
I wondered for a moment how I had gotten here.
And I wondered if maybe this is what Tatsu had meant when he said I could never retire. That I would inevitably ruin every other possibility.
We shall not cease from exploration, some poet wrote. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.
How incredibly fucking depressing.
4
AFTER LEAVING BELGHAZI’S suite, I took a long, solitary walk along the waterfront. I wanted to think about what had just happened, about what I wanted to happen next.
Delilah. Who was she? How would her presence affect my operation? The same questions, of course, that she would be asking about me.
I knew from her deportment that she was trained. Therefore likely to be working with an organization, rather than on some sort of private mission. And that, despite public appearances, she was no friend of Belghazi’s. She was with him because she wanted something from him, something he kept, or that she thought he kept, on his laptop, but that she hadn’t yet managed to get.
I considered. By conspiring to get me out of the suite, she had sided, at least temporarily, with me. We shared a secret. That secret might become the basis for cooperation, if our interests were sufficiently aligned.
But she also had reason to view me as a threat. There was some hard evidence of her operation against Belghazi, in the form of her dual-purpose cell phone and the boot log on Belghazi’s computer, which the wrong people could find if they knew where to look. If someone like me were to steer them to it, for example.
I realized that my knowledge of that potentially damning evidence gave Delilah a reason to want me out of the way. “Out of the way” might take a variety of different forms, of course, but none of them would be particularly attractive from my standpoint.
Still, it wouldn’t make sense for her to do anything too aggressive without first trying to learn more. If she had struck me as stupid or inexperienced, I might have concluded otherwise. But she’d obviously been around for a while, and she was smart. I thought I could reasonably expect her to play things accordingly.
I smiled. You mean, to play it the way you would. Yes, that was probably true.
Again, she would be coming to similar conclusions, mutatis mutandis, as the lawyers like to say, about me.
So the risk of a meeting seemed manageable. Moreover, avoiding her, and losing an opportunity to acquire additional information, would make proceeding against Belghazi more difficult, possibly more dangerous. Not an easy call, but in the end I decided to go see her at the Mandarin casino.
I used the cell phone to call Kanezaki. It was late, but he answered after only one ring.
“It’s me,” I said.
“Is it a coincidence, or do you just enjoy calling me in the middle of the night?”
“This time it’s both.”
“What do you need?”
“Information,” I said. “Anything you have on a woman I ran into, although I don’t have much for you to go on. She uses the name Delilah, probably among others. I think she’s European, but I’m not sure what nationality. She’s tall, blond, striking looks.”
“You need this information operationally, or are you trying to get a date?”
Maybe he thought that busting my chops would foster “camaraderie.” Or that it would otherwise put us on a more equal footing. Either way I didn’t care for it.
“Also, she’s shacking up with our friend,” I said.
“That’s not much to go on.”
“Is there an echo on this line?” I asked, my voice an octave lower. It seemed he’d recently learned the value of playing up the difficulty of accomplishing whatever he was tasked with, the better to play the hero when he subsequently pulled it off. He was overusing the technique the way a child overuses a new word.
There was a pause that I found satisfying, then he said, “I’m just saying that it might be hard to find anything useful with the particulars you’ve given me.”
“I’m not interested in your assessment of how difficult it might be. What I need is the information. Can you get it or not?”
There was another pause, and I imagined him reddening on the other end of the line. Good. Kanezaki seemed to be getting the idea that I worked for him. Although I supposed this sort of misapprehension was probably common enough among the world’s newly minted Secret Agents, I didn’t like being the subject of it. It might be beneficial for him occasionally to be reminded that I work for myself. That he was a stagehand, not one of the actors.
I heard a voice in the background, muffled but audible. “That’s John, isn’t it,” the voice said. “Let me talk to him!”
Christ, I knew that twang. It was Dox.
There was an exchange that I couldn’t make out, followed by a hiss of static and a clatter. Then Dox was on the phone, his voice booming and full of amusement.
“Hey, buddy, sounds like you’re having yourself a good time there! Are we talking blonde, or brunette? Or Asian? I love those Asian ladies.”
He must have snatched the phone over Kanezaki’s protests. Secret Agents get no respect.
“What are you doing out there?” I asked, smiling despite myself.
“Oh you know, just a meeting with my handler. Going over this and that. What about you? Guess you decided to take advantage of Uncle Sam’s magnanimity. Good for you, and tough luck for the bad guys.”
“You mind putting him back on the phone?”
“All right, all right, no need to act short with me. Just wanted to say hello, and welcome aboard.”
“That was good of you.”
There was a pause, then Kanezaki’s voice came back on. “Hey.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a little date of your own out there,” I said, unable to resist.
“I wouldn’t call it that.” He sounded glum.
I chuckled. “Not unless you’ve done hard time with a cellmate named Bubba.”
He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn’t want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naïve sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not something to toss away needlessly.
“I’ll check the bulletin board,” I told him. “If you find anything about the woman, just put it up there.”
“Okay.”
I paused, then added, “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” he said, and I thought he might be smiling.
AT ABOUT six o’clock the following evening, I dropped by the Mandarin casino. Delilah had said eight, but I like to show up for meetings early. It helps prevent surprises.
I used the street entrance, preferring to avoid the hotel for the moment. Keiko was out, but I wanted to minimize the chances of my running into her while she was coming or going. I walked up the escalator, nodded agreeably to the guards, and went inside.