“But you’ve got other ports in the area, too. Macau itself, Singapore, Manila-”
“True, but Hong Kong is the busiest. Busiest in the world, in fact.”
“So?”
“So, if you’re trying to hide something, obscure its appearance, you might want to send it through a port that handles, say, sixteen million containers a year. A needle in a haystack. Also, these guys have learned not to rely too much on any particular facility. They ship small and distributed. Then, even if any given shipment gets interdicted, the balance gets through. And overall, the distributed approach makes it much harder to shut down the pipeline, or even to get an accurate understanding of its true size. And Belghazi has been moving around, you know. We intercepted calls from Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok.”
“Yeah, I know he was off Macau at one point,” I said, remembering Delilah telling me that he had meetings in the region. I thought for a moment, wondering if there was an opportunity there. “How closely can you track him in those other cities?” I asked.
“As closely as we can in Macau. Which is to say, not very. We can only pinpoint his location for as long as he stays on the phone, and he tends to keep his calls short. Once he’s off, we only know where the call came from.”
I nodded, realizing that none of this would be enough for me to use if Belghazi’s visits in the region were short-term. My best chance was still Macau, where something special seemed to be going on, and where I’d already familiarized myself with the local terrain.
Kanezaki said, “Maybe he’s in Macau for the same infrastructure reasons that have taken him elsewhere.”
“Maybe. But the thing is, if Macau were just one of many distribution points for him, he wouldn’t be there now. The benefit wouldn’t be worth the risk, because he knows he’s been tracked there. So why? More meetings there, like the ones he’s doing elsewhere?”
He shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. Southeast Asia is big for him now because of groups like Jemaah Islamiah. You don’t have anything like that on Macau. The players, and likewise the meetings, would be elsewhere.”
“Well, something is going on there. If you can find out what that is, why he’s really there, what he’s really doing, who he’s really meeting with, I’ll have a much better chance of getting close to him again.”
“I understand.”
I nodded slowly, then looked at him. Or rather I looked through him, as though he was somehow immaterial, a thing that mattered to me only slightly, something I could leave on or turn off as easily as I might flip a light switch. I said, “Kanezaki, I hope none of what you’ve told me today is untrue.”
He looked at me, keeping his cool. “The facts are true,” he said. “The speculation is only that. Keep in mind the difference before you decide to go precipitous on me, okay?”
I nodded again, still looking through him. “Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said.
I LEFT KANEZAKI and made my way to the Fiorentina trattoria, a restaurant in the new Grand Hyatt hotel, where I had told Tatsu to meet me. I arrived early, as I always do, and sipped iced coffee from a tall glass while I waited. I decided that I liked the restaurant, although not without some ambivalence. It was sleek without feeling artificial, with décor of leather and wood and other natural materials; good lighting; and lots of clean, vertical lines. Still, there was something vaguely disconcerting about how suddenly it, and the surrounding hotel and shopping complex, had sprung up. None of it had been here when I was living in Tokyo, and yet here was a virtual city within the city, which the planners had christened Roppongi Hills. You could almost imagine the Titan gods of the metropolis whipping a white sheet from over their newest creation and proclaiming with a flourish and a falsely modest bow that It Was Good.
And maybe it was good. Certainly the people around me seemed to be enjoying it. Still, the place had no history, and, somehow, no context. It was attractive, yes, but it all felt fearlessly forward-looking, miraculously unmindful of the past. And therefore, I thought, oddly American.
I smiled. No wonder I felt ambivalent. It was a transplant, like me.
An hour later, I saw Tatsu walk in through the lobby entrance, pause, and scope the room. A waitress approached and said something to him, probably an inquiry about seating him, and he responded by tilting his head in her direction but without taking his eyes off the room. Then he saw me. He nodded his head in recognition and muttered something to the waitress, then shuffled over.
I smiled as he approached and rose from my seat. There was something eternally endearing about that trademark shuffle, and about the interchangeably rumpled dark suits that always accompanied it. I realized how glad I was that Tatsu and I had found a way to live under a flag of truce. Partly because he could be such a formidable adversary, of course, but much more because he had proven himself a fine friend, albeit not one above requesting a “favor” when practicality demanded.
We bowed and shook hands, then looked each other over. “You look good,” I told him in Japanese. And it was true. He’d lost a little weight, and seemed younger as a result.
He grunted, a suitably modest form of thanks, then said, “My wife has entered into a conspiracy with my doctor. She cooks differently now. No oil, no frying. I have to sneak into places like this one to satisfy my appetite.”
I smiled. “She’s on your side.”
He grunted again and looked me up and down. “You’re staying fit, I see?”
I shrugged. “I do what I can. It doesn’t get easier.”
We sat down. I said, “You know, Tatsu, that’s the most small talk I’ve ever gotten out of you.”
He nodded. “Don’t tell my colleagues. It would ruin my reputation.”
I smiled. “How’s your family?”
He beamed. “Everyone is very fine. I will be a grandfather next month. A boy, the doctor says.”
My smile broadened. “Good for you, my friend. Congratulations.”
He nodded his thanks and looked at me. “And you?”
“Me…”
“Your family.”
I looked at him. “You know there’s no family, Tatsu.”
He shrugged. “People get families by starting families.”
Tatsu had set me up with a few women not long after I’d first returned to Japan, following the Late Unpleasantness. It hadn’t worked out all that well.
“I think I’m pretty well committed to my exciting bachelor’s existence,” I told him. “You know, meet new people. See the world.”
It came out less flip than I had intended, and maybe with a slightly bitter edge.
“ ‘It doesn’t get easier,’ ” he said. “As you noted.”
I sighed. “Still trying to connect me to something larger than myself?”
“You need it,” he said, his expression serious.
Christ, just what I always wanted-a maternal Tatsu. “Information is what I need,” I said.
He nodded. “Does this mean our small talk is over?”
I laughed, surprised. “I didn’t want to exhaust you. I know you’re not accustomed to it.”
“I was just warming up.”
I laughed again, thinking, Why not.
We wound up discussing all sorts of little things: his joy at his daughter’s pregnancy, and his fear that he and his wife might look at the child as some sort of replacement for the infant son they had lost; his frustration with bureaucratic inertia, with his inability to do more to fight the corruption that he believed was poisoning Japan; the way Tokyo, the way the country, was changing in front of his eyes. And I told him some things, too: how the Agency had tracked me down; how eventually I would have to move, and painstakingly reinvent myself again; how I tried not to despair at the thought that it would all once more prove futile, partly because in the end someone would always come looking for me, partly because some restless thing inside me seemed to insist that I move on regardless. We reminisced over some of the experiences we had shared in Vietnam, when Tatsu had been seconded to the war by the Keisatsucho’s predecessor and I, because of my Japanese, was tasked with liaising with him; the people we had known there, the friends we had lost.