Midori had gotten up while I was in the shower. She was wearing a white terry-cloth hotel robe and sat on the bed silently while I dressed. “I like you in a suit,” she told me when I was done. “You look good.”
“Just a sarariman on his way to work,” I said, trying to keep it light.
I slipped the Glock into a custom holster at the small of my back, where it would be concealed by the nice drape of the flannel. Then I eased the flashbang up under my armpit above the sleeve of the suit, where the natural compression of my arm held it in place. I moved my arm out a few centimeters and jiggled it hard, and the device slid down into my waiting hand. Satisfied, I put it back in position.
I rotated my head and heard the joints in my neck crack. “Okay. I’ve got to go. I’ll be back sometime in the evening. Will you wait for me?”
She nodded, her face set. “I’ll be here. Just come back.”
“I will.” I picked up the attaché and left.
The hotel lobby was relatively empty of the visiting businessmen who would soon arise and meet for overpriced power breakfasts. I walked out through the front doors and shook my head at the bellman’s offer to assist me with a cab, preferring instead an indirect walk to Tokyo Station, which would give me the chance to ensure that I wasn’t being followed. From the station I would catch the train to Shinbashi, and from Shinbashi to the station at Yokosuka. I could have gone directly from Tokyo Station, but preferred a more circuitous route for my usual reasons.
It was a brisk, clear morning: rare weather for Tokyo, and the kind I’ve always liked best. As I cut across Hibiya Park I saw a small asagao, a morning glory, blooming improbably in the cold spray of one of the fountains. It was a summer flower, and looked sad to me, as though it knew it would die soon in the autumn chill.
At Tokyo Station I bought a ticket to Shinbashi, where I transferred to the Yokosuka line, checking my back on the way. I bought a two-way ticket to Yokosuka, although a one-way would have been marginally more secure. All soldiers are superstitious, as Crazy Jake had liked to say, and old habits die hard.
I got on the train at 7:00, and it eased out of the station four minutes later, precisely on time. Seventy-four minutes after that we pulled into Yokusuka Station, across the harbor from the naval base. I stepped out onto the platform, attaché case in hand, and busied myself making an ostensible phone call from a public booth while the other passengers who had gotten off the train departed.
From the station I walked along the esplanade that follows the waterline of Yokosuka Harbor. A cold wind sliced across the water into my face, smelling faintly of the sea. The sky was dark, in contrast to the clear weather in Tokyo. Too good to last, I thought.
The harbor surface was as gray and foreboding as the sky. I paused on a wooden walkway overlooking the harbor, watching the brooding U.S. warships at rest, the clumps of hills behind them startlingly green against the gray of everything else. The detritus of the military was rhythmically washing up against the sea-wall below me: empty bottles, cigarette packs, plastic bags like some bizarre and decaying species of sea creature that had been wounded in the deep and come to the surface to die.
The harbor reminded me of Yokohama, and the long-ago Sunday mornings when my mother would take me there. Yokohama was where she went to church, and she was going to raise me as a Catholic. Back then we left from Shibuya Station, and the trip took over an hour, not the twenty minutes in which the distance can be covered today.
I remember the long train rides, on which my mother would always take my hand, literally leading me away from my father’s displeasure at the imposition of this primitive Western ritual on his impressionable young son. The church was an insidiously sensory experience: the settled, wooden smells of old paper and seat cushions; the erect pews, rigid as body casts; the glittering light of stained-glass angels; the ominous echoes of the liturgy; the bland taste of the Eucharist. All catalyzed by a dawning sense that the experience took place through a window that my father, the other half of my cultural heritage, would have preferred to keep closed.
People like to say that the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group.
But I can tell you as the Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn’t a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity: if the group doesn’t care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.
I heard tires crunching gravel, and turned toward the parking lot behind me just in time to see the first of three black sedans brake to a stop a few meters from where I was standing. The rear doors flew open and a man got out on each side. All Caucasians. Holtzer, I thought.
The follow-on cars stopped to the left and right of the lead; with my back to the water, I was encircled. Two more men got out of each of the additional cars. All of them were brandishing compact Berettas.
“Get in,” the one closest to me growled, gesturing to the lead car with his gun.
“I don’t think so,” I said evenly. If they were going to kill me, I’d make them do it here.
Six of them stood around me in a semicircle. If they closed in a little tighter, I could try to blast through one of the guys at the outer edge — his opposite number would be afraid to shoot, lest he hit his comrade.
But they were well disciplined and resisted the urge to close. Probably they’d been briefed on the dangers of getting too near.
Instead, one of them reached under his jacket and pulled out what I instantly recognized as a taser — a stun gun.
Which meant they wanted to take me, not kill me. I pivoted to launch myself at the nearest man, but too late. I heard the pop of the taser firing its twin electrical darts, felt them sink into my thigh, current surging through my body. I went down, jerking helplessly, willing my hand to pull out the darts but getting no response from my twitching limbs.
They let the current surge for longer than they had to, standing around me while I spasmed like a fish on a deck. Finally it stopped, but I still had no control over my limbs and couldn’t draw a breath. I felt them doing a pat-down — ankles, thighs, lower back. Hands pushed up the back of the suit jacket and I felt the Glock being taken from its holster. I waited for the pat-down to continue but it didn’t. They must have been satisfied that they had found my weapon, and searched no further — an amateur mistake that saved the flashbang, which had stayed in place.
Someone knelt on my neck and handcuffed my arms behind my back. A hood was pulled over my head. Someone else moved in and I felt them pick me up, limp as a burlap sack, and dump me onto the floor in the back of one of the cars. Then knees were pressing down on my back, doors were slamming, and the car jerked into motion.
We drove for less than five minutes. From our speed and the absence of turns, I knew we were still on National Highway 16 and that we had passed the base. During the ride I tested my fingers, wiggled my toes. Control was coming back, but my nervous system was still scrambled from the electric jolt I had received, and I felt sick to my stomach.
I felt the car slow down and turn right, heard gravel crunching beneath the tires. We stopped. Doors opened, and a pair of hands took me by each ankle and dragged me out of the car. My head smacked the bottom edge of the door on the way out and I saw stars.