“You don’t have to tell me whether you knew about this,” Harry said, interrupting my musings. “I know the rules.”
I considered how much I should reveal. If I wanted to learn more, his skills would be helpful. On the other hand, I didn’t like the idea of his getting any closer to the true nature of my work. He was getting uncomfortably close already. Tatsu’s name on that report, for example. I had to assume that Harry would follow it like a link on the Internet, that he would tap into Tatsu’s conspiracy theories, that he would sense a connection with me. Hardly proof beyond a reasonable doubt, of course, but between them Harry and Tatsu would have a significant number of puzzle pieces.
Sitting there in Las Chicas, sipping my chai latte, I had to admit that Harry could become a problem. The realization depressed me. Christ, I thought, you’re getting sentimental.
Maybe it was time to get out of this shit. Maybe this time it really was.
“I didn’t know about it,” I said after a moment. “This is an unusual case.” I saw no harm in telling him about the stranger on the train, and did so.
“If we were in New York, I’d tell you it was a pickpocket,” he said when I was done.
“I thought the same thing when I first saw it. But pickpocket would be a piss-poor career choice for a white boy in Tokyo. You have to blend.”
“Target of opportunity?”
I shook my head. “Not too many people are that shameless and cold-blooded. I doubt one of them just happened to be standing next to Kawamura that morning. I think the guy was a Kawamura contact, there for some kind of exchange.”
“Why do you suppose the Keisatsucho is investigating a simple break-in in a Tokyo apartment?” he asked.
“That I don’t know,” I said, although Tatsu’s involvement made me wonder. “Maybe Kawamura’s position in the government, the recency of his death, something like that. That’s the theory I’d go on.”
He looked at me. “Are you asking me to dig?”
I should have let it go. But I’ve been used before. The feeling that it had happened again would keep me awake at night. Had Benny put a B-team on Kawamura? I figured I might as well let Harry provide some clues.
“You will anyway, right?” I asked.
He blinked. “Can’t help myself, I guess.”
“Dig away, then. Let me know what else you find. And watch your back, hotshot. Don’t get sloppy.”
The warning was for both of us.
3
TELLING HARRY TO watch his back made me think of Jimmy Calhoun, my best friend in high school, of who Jimmy was before he became Crazy Jake.
Jimmy and I joined the Army together when we were barely seventeen years old. I remember the recruiter telling us we would need parental permission to join. “See that woman outside?” he had asked us. “Give her this twenty, ask her if she’ll sign as your mother.” She did. Later, I realized this woman was making her living this way.
Jimmy and I had met, in a sense, through his younger sister, Deirdre. She was a beautiful, black-haired Irish rose, and one of the few people who was nice to the awkward, out-of-place kid I was in Dryden. Some idiot told Jimmy I liked her, which was true, of course, and Jimmy decided he didn’t like a guy with slanty eyes hitting on his sister. He was bigger than I was, but I fought him to a standstill. After that, he respected me, and became my ally against the Dryden bullies, my first real friend. Deirdre and I started dating, and woe to anyone who gave Jimmy a hard time about it.
I told Deirdre before we left that I was going to marry her when I got back. She told me she’d be waiting. “Watch out for Jimmy, okay?” she asked me. “He’s got too much to prove.”
Jimmy and I had told the recruiter we wanted to serve together, and the guy said he would make it happen. I don’t know if the recruiter had anything to do with it, in fact he was probably lying, but it worked out the way we asked. Jimmy and I did Special Forces training together at Fort Bragg, then wound up in the same unit, in a joint military-CIA program called the Studies and Observation Group, or SOG. The Studies and Observation moniker was a joke, some idiot bureaucrat’s attempt to give the organization a low profile. You might as well name a pit bull Pansy.
SOG’s mission was clandestine reconnaissance and sabotage missions into Cambodia and Laos, sometimes even into North Vietnam. The teams were composed of LURRPs, an acronym for men specializing in long-range reconnaissance patrols. Three Americans and nine Civilian Irregular Defense Group personnel, or CIDGs. The CIDGs were usually Khmer mercenaries recruited by the CIA, sometimes Montagnards. Three men would go into the bush for one, two, three weeks at a time, living off the land, no contact with MACV, the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.
We were the elite of the elite, small and mobile, slipping like silent ghosts through the jungle. All the moving parts on the weapons were taped down for noise suppression. We operated so much at night that we could see in the dark. We didn’t even use bug repellent because the V.C. could smell it. We were that serious.
We were operating in Cambodia at the same time Nixon was publicly pledging respect for Cambodia’s neutrality. If our activities got out, Nixon would have had to admit that he’d been lying not just to the public, but to Congress as well. So our activities weren’t just clandestine, they were outright denied, all the way to the top. For some of our missions we had to travel stripped, with no U.S.-issued weapons or other matériel. Other times we couldn’t even get air support for fear that a pilot would be shot down and captured. When we lost a man, his family would get a telegram saying he had been killed “west of Dak To” or “near the border” or some other vague description like that.
We started out all right. Before we went, we talked about what we would and wouldn’t do. We’d heard the stories. Everyone knew about My Lai. We were going to keep cool heads, stay professional. Keep our innocence, really. I can almost laugh, when I think about it now.
Jimmy became known as “Crazy Jake” because he fell asleep in the middle of our first firefight. Tracer rounds were coming at us from beyond the tree line, everyone was hunkered down, firing back at people we couldn’t even see, and it went on for hours because we couldn’t call in air support due to our illegal location. Jimmy said “fuck it” in the middle of things and took a nap. Everyone thought that was pretty cool. While they were saying, “you’re crazy, man, you’re crazy,” Jimmy said, “well I knew everything was jake.” So after that he was Crazy Jake. Outside the two of us, I don’t think anyone ever knew his real name.
Jimmy didn’t just act crazy; he looked it. A teenage motorcycle accident had almost cost him an eye. The doctors got it back in, but couldn’t get it to focus in line with his good eye, so Jimmy always looked as though he was watching something off to the side while he was talking to you. “Omnidirectional,” he liked to say, with a smile, when he caught someone trying to steal a glance at it.
Jimmy had been social enough in high school but got quiet in Vietnam, training constantly, serious about his work. He wasn’t a big guy, but people were afraid of him. Once, an MP with a German shepherd confronted Jimmy about some unruly behavior in a bar. Jimmy didn’t look at him, acted like he wasn’t even there. Instead, he stared at the dog. Something passed between them, some animal thing, and the dog whimpered and backed away. The MP got spooked and wisely decided to let the whole thing go, and the incident became part of the growing legend of Crazy Jake, that even guard dogs were afraid of him.