My things were already waiting for me in the room, the shirts pressed and the suits hung neatly. I bolted the door and sat down on the bed, then checked a false compartment in the suitcase they had brought up, where I saw the dull gleam of the Glock. I opened up the toiletry kit, took out the rounds I wanted from a dummy can of deodorant, loaded the gun, and slipped it between the mattress and the box spring.
At nine o’clock the phone rang. I picked it up, recognized Midori’s voice, and told her the room number.
A minute later there was a quiet knock at the door. I got up and looked through the peephole. The light in the room was off, so the person on the other side wouldn’t know whether the occupant was checking to see who was out there. Leaving the light on can make you a nice target for a shotgun blast.
It was Midori, as expected. I let her in and bolted the door behind her. When I turned toward her, she was looking around the room. “Hey, it’s about time we stayed in a place like this,” she said. “Those love hotels can get old.”
“But they have their advantages,” I said, putting my arms around her.
We ordered a dinner of sashimi and hot sake from the room-service menu, and while we waited for it to arrive I filled Midori in on my meeting with Tatsu, told her the bad news about Bulfinch.
The food arrived, and, when the hotel employee who brought it had left, Midori said, “I have to ask you something a little . . . silly. Is that okay?”
I looked at her, and felt my gut twist at the honesty in her eyes. “Sure.”
“I’ve been thinking about these people. They killed Bulfinch. They tried to kill you and me. They must have wanted to kill my father. Do you think . . . did he really have a heart attack?”
I poured sake from the ceramic flask into two small matching cups, watching wisps of steam rise from the surface. My hands were steady. “Your question isn’t silly. There are ways of killing someone that make it look like an accident, or like natural causes. And I agree that, based on what they learned of your father’s activities, they certainly would have wanted him dead.”
“He was afraid they were going to kill him. He told me.”
“Yes.”
She was drumming her fingers on the table, playing a furious tune on an imaginary piano. There was a cold fire in her eyes. “I think they killed him,” she said, nodding.
There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done. “You may be right,” I said, quietly.
Did she know? Or did her mind refuse to go where instinct wanted to take her? I couldn’t tell.
“What matters is that your father was a brave man,” I said, my voice slightly thick. “And that, regardless of how he died, he shouldn’t have died in vain. That’s why I have to get that disk back. Why I have to finish what your father started. I really . . .” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. “I really want to do that. I need to do it.”
Warring emotions crossed her face like the shadows of fast-moving clouds. “I don’t want you to,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s less dangerous than it seems. My friend is going to make sure that the police who are there know what’s going on, so no one is going to take a shot at me.” I hoped.
“What about the CIA people? You can’t control them.”
I thought about that. Tatsu had probably already figured that if I got killed on the way in, he would use it as an excuse to order everyone out of the car, search for weapons, and find the disk that way. He was a practical guy.
“Nobody’s going to shoot me. The way I’ve got it set up, they won’t even know what’s going on until it’s too late.”
“I thought that, in war, nothing goes according to plan.”
I laughed. “That’s true. I’ve made it this far by being a good improviser.”
I took a swallow of sake. “Anyway, we’re about out of alternatives,” I said, enjoying the feeling of the hot liquid spreading through my abdomen. “Yamaoto doesn’t know that Holtzer has the disk, so he’s going to keep coming after you if we don’t get it back. And after me, too.”
We ate for a few minutes in silence. Then she looked at me and said, “It makes sense, but it’s still terrible.” Her voice was bitter.
I wanted to tell her that eventually you get used to terrible things that make sense. But I said nothing.
She stood up and wandered over to the window. Her back was to me, the glow through the window silhouetting her. I watched her for a moment, then got up and walked over, feeling the carpet taking the weight of my feet. I stopped close enough to smell the clean smell of her hair, and some other, more exotic scent, and slowly, slowly let my hands rise so that my fingertips were just touching her shoulders and arms.
Then my fingertips gave way to my hands, and when my hands made their way to her hips she eased back into me. Her hands found mine and together they rose up, covering her belly and stroking it in such a way that I couldn’t tell who was initiating the movement.
Standing there with her, looking out the window over Tokyo, I felt the weight of what I would face in the morning drift slowly away from me. I had the exhilarating realization that there was nowhere, nowhere on the whole planet, that I would rather have been right then. The city around us was a living thing: the million lights were its eyes; the laughter of lovers its voice; the expressways and factories its muscles and sinews. And I was there at its pulsing heart.
Just a little more time, I thought, kissing her neck, her ear. A little more time at an anonymous hotel where we could float untethered from the past, free of all the things that I knew would soon end my fragile bond with this woman.
I became increasingly aware of the sound of her breathing, the taste of her skin, and my languid sense of the city and our place in it faded. She turned and kissed me, softly, then harder, her hands on my face, under my shirt, the heat from her touch spreading through my torso like ripples on water.
We tumbled onto the bed, stripping off each other’s clothes, tossing them helter-skelter to the floor. Her back was arched upward and I was kissing her breasts, her belly, and she said, “No, now, I want you now,” and I moved up, feeling her legs on either side of me, and into her. She made a sound like the wind picking up, and we moved against each other, with each other, slowly at first, then more urgently. We were fused together, breathing the breath from each other’s lungs, the sensation arcing from my head to my groin to my toes and back again until I couldn’t tell where my body ended and hers began. I felt a rumbling between us and in us like storm clouds rolling in and when I came it was like a thunderclap from everywhere, her body and my body and all the places where we were joined.
We lay there afterward, still entwined, exhausted as though we had done battle but had failed to vanquish each other with our last and mightiest blows. “Sugoi,” she said. “What did they put in the sake?”
I smiled at her. “You want to get another bottle?”
“A lot of bottles,” she said, drowsily. And that was the last thing either of us said before I drifted off into a sleep that was mercifully untroubled by memories and only slightly marred by dread of what was still to come.
23
I GOT UP just before dawn, and stood looking out the window as the lights came on in Tokyo and the city slowly emerged from its slumber, dreamily stretching its fingers and toes. Midori was still sleeping.
I showered and dressed in one of the suits I keep at the Imperial, an eleven-ounce gray flannel from Paul Stuart. A white Sea Island cotton shirt, conservative blue tie. The shoes were bench made, the well-seasoned attaché from a tragically defunct British leather-goods manufacturer called W. H. Gidden. I was dressed better than most people who are supposed to look the part — again, the details are what make the disguise, or give you away. And who knows? I thought. If this doesn’t go well, you could be buried in this outfit. You might as well look good.