“I know.”
“I want to ask you a question,” he said. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your angle on this? Why are you looking so hard? It’s not like you.”
I thought about telling him that I was doing it for a client, but I knew he wouldn’t buy that.
“Some of what’s been happening doesn’t jibe with what the client told me,” I said. “That makes me uncomfortable.”
“This uncomfortable?”
I could see he was in a relentless mood today. “It reminds me of something that happened to me a long time ago,” I said, telling him the truth. “Something I want to make sure never happens again. Let’s leave it at that for now.”
He held up his hands for a moment, palms forward in a gesture of supplication, then leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “Okay, the guy you followed, we can assume he lives in the apartment building. A good number of foreigners live in Daikanyama, but I can’t imagine there are more than a dozen or so in that one building. So we’re already in decent shape.”
“Good.”
“The mama-san said he told her he was a reporter?”
“She did, but that doesn’t mean much. I think he showed her a card, but it could have been fake.”
“Maybe, but it’s a start. I’ll try to cross-check the foreigners I find at that apartment address against the declarations kept at the Nyukan, see if any of the people I identify are with the media.” The Nyukan, or Nyukokukanrikyoku, is Japan’s immigration bureau, part of the Ministry of Justice.
“Do that. And while you’re at it, see if you can get me the girl’s home address. I tried one-zero-four, but it’s unlisted.”
He scratched his cheek and looked down, as though trying to hide a smile.
“What,” I said.
He looked up. “You like her.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Harry . . .”
“You thought she was going to open up for you, and instead she blew you off. Now it’s a challenge. You want another chance.”
“Harry, you’re dreaming.”
“Is she pretty? Just tell me that.”
“I’m not going to give you the satisfaction.”
“So she’s pretty. You like her.”
“You’ve been reading too many manga,” I said, referring to the thick, often lascivious pulp comic books that are so popular in Japan.
“Okay, sure,” he said, and I thought, Christ, he really does read that shit. I’ve hurt his feelings.
“C’mon, Harry, I need your help to get to the bottom of this. That guy on the train was expecting Kawamura to be carrying something, which is why he patted him down. He didn’t find it, though — otherwise, he wouldn’t have been asking Midori questions. Now you tell me: Who currently has possession of all of Kawamura’s belongings, including the clothes he was wearing and personal effects he was carrying when he died?”
“Midori, most likely,” he allowed with a small shrug.
“Right. She’s still the best lead we’ve got. Get me the information, and we’ll go from there.”
We talked about other matters for the duration of our lunch. I didn’t tell him about the CD. He’d already leaped to enough conclusions.
7
THE NEXT DAY I got a page from Harry, who used a preset numeric code to tell me that he had uploaded something to a bulletin board we use. I figured it was Midori’s address, and Harry didn’t disappoint.
She lived in a small apartment complex called Harajuku Badento Haitsu — Harajuku Verdent Heights — in the shadow of the graceful arches of Tange Kenzo’s 1964 Tokyo Olympic Stadium. Cool Harajuku is the borderland that traverses the long silences and solemn cryptomeria trees of Yoyogi Park and its Meiji shrine; the frenetic, shopping-addled teen madness of Takeshita-dori; and the elegant boutiques and bistros of Omotesando.
Harry had confirmed that Midori did not have an automobile registered with the Tokyo Motor Vehicles Authority, which meant that she would rely on trains: either the JR, which she would pick up at Harajuku Station, or one of the subway lines, which she would access at Meijijingu-mae or Omotesando.
The problem was that the JR and subway stations were in opposite directions, and she was as likely to use one as the other. With no single chokepoint leading to both sets of stations, I had no basis for choosing either one. I would just have to find the best possible venue for waiting and watching and base my decision on that.
Omotesando-dori, where the subway stations were located, fit the bill. Known as the “Champs Elysées of Tokyo,” albeit mostly among people who have never been to Paris, Omotesando-dori is a long shopping boulevard lined with elm trees whose narrow leaves provide first a crown and then a carpet of yellow for a few days every autumn. Its many bistros and coffee shops were designed with Paris-style people-watching in mind, and I would be able to spend an hour or two watching the street from various establishments without attracting attention.
Even so, absent a lot of luck, I would have been in for a very boring few days of waiting and watching. But Harry had an innovation that saved me: a way of remotely turning a phone into a microphone.
The trick only works with digital phones with a speakerphone feature, where a line can be established even though the handset is in the cradle. The reception is muffled, but you can hear. Anticipating my next move, Harry had tested Midori’s line for me and had let me know that we were good to go.
At ten o’clock the following Saturday morning, I arrived at the Aoyama Blue Mountain coffee shop on Omotesando-dori, equipped with a small unit that would activate Midori’s phone and a cell phone for listening in on whatever I connected to. I took a seat at one of the small tables facing the street, where I ordered an espresso from a bored-looking waitress. Watching the meager morning crowds drift past, I flipped the switch on the unit and heard a slight hiss in the earpiece that told me the connection had been established. Other than that, there was silence. Nothing to do but wait.
A construction crew had set up a few meters down from the Blue Mountain’s entrance, where they were repairing potholes in the road. Four workers busied themselves mixing the gravel and measuring out the right amounts — about two more men than were needed, but the yakuza, the Japanese mob, works closely with the construction industry and insists that workers be provided with work. The government, pleased at this additional avenue of job creation, is complicit. Unemployment is kept at socially tolerable levels. The machine rolls on.
As vice minister at the Kokudokotsusho, Midori’s father would have been in charge of construction and most of the major public-works projects undertaken throughout Japan. He would have been hip deep in a lot of this. Not such a surprise that someone wanted him to come to an untimely end.
Two middle-aged men in black suits and ties, modern Japanese funeral attire, left the coffee shop, and the aroma of hot gravel wafted over to my table. The smell reminded me of my childhood in Japan, of the late summers when my mother would walk me to school for the first day of the new term. The roads always seemed to be in the process of being repaved at that time of year, and to me this kind of construction still smells like a portent of a fresh round of bullying and ostracism.
Sometimes I feel as though my life has been divided into segments. I would call these chapters, but the pieces are divided so abruptly that the whole lacks the kind of continuity that chapters would impart. The first segment ends when my father was killed, an event that shattered a world of predictability and security, replacing it with vulnerability and fear. There is another break when I receive the brief military telegram telling me that my mother has died, offering stateside leave for the funeral. Along with my mother I lost an emotional center of gravity, a faraway psychic governor on my behavior, and was left suffused with a new and awful sense of freedom. Cambodia was a further rupture, a deeper step into darkness.