I smiled. “I was trying to find some elegant solution and I was totally stumped. But after I saw it was simply a matter of shuffling the patterns around and trying every possible combination, I realized that this whole problem was actually child’s play.”
22
The headquarters of the Sekiguchi-gummi was near Tokyo’s Tsujiki Fish Market, in a relatively modest neighborhood of three- and four-story buildings. It was in a modern four-story office building that looked neat and clean. There were no signs on the front, but there was some kind of logo on the front door of the building done in gold. It was a circle with three bars and a dot.
It seemed peculiar to me that a crime family would have an office, but I guess in some American cities organized crime uses bars and restaurants for its headquarters, and everyone in the neighborhood knows it. Sugimoto had offered to come with me but I turned him down. His English skills would have been handy, but I didn’t trust him. I might be paranoid, but I didn’t know what his past relationship with the Sekiguchi-gummi was, so I didn’t want him coming along to muddy up the waters. Besides, I had arranged for my own companion.
We walked through the front door of the building. In the modest lobby there was a desk and a young man in his twenties was sitting there to act as a receptionist. He was studying some kind of newspaper. It looked like the horse-racing forms we have in the United States, except this paper had pictures of small outboard motor boats that seemed to be racing each other around some kind of circular pond with a grandstand. Many Asians like to gamble and it looked like this guy was selecting his picks for races to be held that day.
He didn’t bother looking up at us until we approached his desk. Then he looked up from his paper and continued to look up and up and further up. He more or less ignored me, but since I was standing next to Gary Apia, I could see where I might be lost in the shadow of Gary’s seven-foot, five-hundred-pound frame. The man sat there with an open mouth.
When I asked Gary to accompany me, he had given me a quick “Sure, bruddah.”
“Before you agree, let me explain what’s happening.” I told him about my involvement with the Sekiguchi-gummi in Los Angeles and what I wanted to accomplish with my visit. I also told him of my run-in with the Yakuza in Hibiya Park. “You might not want to get involved with these guys,” I said.
He laughed. “Those kinda guys are always sniffing around the rikishi, looking for a tip on who to bet on. They don’t scare me. Let’s go for broke.”
That Hawaiian what-the-hell attitude never sounded sweeter to my ears, and now that we were actually in the lobby of the Sekiguchi-gummi building, I was glad to be standing next to him. He was wearing a blue kimono, and his hair was in a simplified version of the elaborate, slicked down hairstyle he wore for sumo wrestling. He told me he was required to dress this way by the association that runs sumo in Japan, and he looked very much like a seventeenth century warrior, instead of a modern athlete. It was hardly the dress for inconspicuous sleuthing, but I wanted to call as much attention to us as possible. If something happened to us, I wanted plenty of people noticing that we went into this building.
Gary, in broken Japanese, announced who we were and why we were there. No response. Gary repeated his request for us to see the head of the Sekiguchi-gummi, then he looked at me and said, “Dis guy must be dumb. My Japanese is bad, but he should know your name and why we’re here.”
I personally thought that sitting in slack-jawed amazement was probably a pretty good response when confronted with Gary’s imposing presence for the first time. The guy acting as a receptionist must have decided it wasn’t a wise policy to irritate the giant, because he finally picked up a phone and started talking in rapid Japanese.
In a few moments a pinched-faced, middle-aged woman came into the lobby. When she saw Gary her eyebrows raised slightly, but otherwise she gave no indication that it was at all unusual to have a kimono-clad mountain standing there. She looked at me and said, “Mr. Tanaka, I’m Mr. Sekiguchi’s private secretary. He asked me to bring you to his office. I’m so very sorry, but I think we might have a problem getting your friend up to his office.”
“What do you mean?” Gary said, his eyebrows narrowing suspiciously.
“Please come with me,” she said. She took us out of the lobby and down a short hall. At the end of the hall was a tiny elevator, which would normally only hold two or three people. It was hard to imagine how Gary would fit into the elevator.
“I don’t like dis,” Gary said.
I thought about ancient Japanese castles with winding entrances and narrow passages which were designed to break up formations of enemy troops. I wondered if the elevator had the same function.
“Why don’t you wait for me, Gary?” I said. “With you here I don’t think anything will happen.”
“Are you sure, bruddah?”
“Pretty sure. Just don’t wander too far away.”
“No sweat, bruddah.” He looked at the secretary and said, “Will you do da translating for him?” I smiled at this. Even I could tell that Gary’s linguistic skills in Japanese were rudimentary, at best. But still, he spoke a lot more conversational Japanese than I could muster.
“Mr. Sekiguchi speaks English, so I’m certain there’ll be no problems with Mr. Tanaka and Mr. Sekiguchi speaking to each other.”
The woman and I crowded into the small elevator. She pressed the button for the fourth floor and we started ascending. I was once in an elevator in New York City, in an old building on Bleecker Street, that was smaller than two phone booths. You could hardly inhale, but the sign on the wall said the maximum capacity was thirteen. I don’t know if Japanese elevator companies have an equally perverse sense of humor, but the elevator we were in was so small that crowding more than three into it would probably constitute some kind of sexual encounter.
When we got to the fourth floor, the door opened and I was stunned.
The elevator opened into a small lobby. While the public lobby downstairs was austere and rather cheap looking, the lobby up here was positively opulent. The rug was a thick blue wool and the walls were beautifully paneled with dark and light woods inlaid in a geometric pattern of rectangles.
In the center of the lobby was a large desk made of wood so dark it almost looked black. The secretarial chair and word processor made me conclude this was the command station for my guide. Hanging on the wall behind the desk was a scroll painting. I don’t know that much about Japanese painting, but this one looked very old and very elegant. It was a painting of a monkey sitting in the bottom corner of the scroll, looking up. In the upper corner of the painting, about six feet from the monkey’s face, there was a tiny butterfly. The huge expanse of white space between the monkey and the butterfly was pristine and effective. In Japanese painting they say that the white space is often as important as the brush strokes, and in this particular composition that was certainly true. The white space made you realize how far above the monkey the beauty of the butterfly was.
On the secretary’s desk was an ikebana flower arrangement. It was a single iris, a long green leaf, and two small white chrysanthemums. Each piece of the arrangement was in perfect harmony and balance with the other. Very elegant and very much in keeping with the lobby.
The secretary walked over to one of the wooden panels and gently pushed, revealing that the panel was a hidden door. Once again I thought about old Japanese castles, which often had secret panels or passageways so that the lord of the castle could escape in case of unexpected attack. The secretary stood to one side and bowed in order to usher me in to Sekiguchi’s office.