Rain Fall (17 page)

I saw the flat-nosed guy go inside as we moved away from the scene, I assumed to help his fallen comrades.

If they had been planning to take her somewhere, they would have had a car. I looked around, but there were too many vehicles parked in the area for me to be able to pinpoint theirs.

“Did they say where they were going to take you?” I asked. “Who they were with?”

“No,” she said. “I told you, they only said they were with the police.”

“Okay, I understand.” Where the hell was their car? There might have been more of them.
All right, go, just keep on walking, they’ll have to show themselves if they want to take you.

We cut across the dark parking lot of the building across from hers, emerging onto Omotesando-dori, where we caught a cab. I told the driver to take us to the Seibu Department Store in Shibuya. I checked the side views as we drove. There were few cars on the road, and none seemed to be trying to tail us.

What I had in mind was a love hotel. The love hotel is a Japanese institution, born of the country’s housing shortage. With families, sometimes extended ones, jammed into small apartments, Mom and Dad need to have somewhere to go to be alone. Hence the
rabu
hoteru
—places with rates for either a “rest” or a “stay,” famously discreet front desk, no credit card required for registration, and fake names the norm. Some of them are completely over-the-top, with theme rooms sporting Roman baths and Americana settings, like what you’d get if you turned the Disney Epcot Center into a bordello.

Beyond Japan’s housing shortage, the hotels arose because inviting a stranger into your home tends to be a much more intimate act in Japan than it is in the States. There are plenty of Japanese women who will allow a man into their bodies before permitting him to enter their apartments, and the hotels serve this aspect of the market, as well.

The people we were up against weren’t stupid, of course. They might guess that a love hotel would make an expedient safe house. That would be my guess, if the tables were turned. But with about ten thousand
rabu hoteru
in Tokyo, it would still take them awhile to track us down.

We got out of the cab and walked to Shibuya 2-chome, which is choked with small love hotels. I chose one at random, where we told the old woman standing inside at the front desk that we wanted a room with a bath, for a
yasumi
—a stay, not just a rest. I put cash on the counter and she reached underneath, then handed us a key.

We took the elevator to the fifth floor, and found our room at the end of a short hallway. I unlocked the door and Midori went in first. I followed her in, locking the door behind me. We left our shoes in the entranceway. There was only one bed—twins in a love
hotel would be as out of place as a Bible—but there was a decent-sized couch in the room that I could curl up on.

Midori sat down on the edge of the bed and faced me. “Here’s where we are,” she said, her voice even. “Tonight three men were waiting for me in my apartment. They claimed to be police, but obviously weren’t—or, if they were police, they were on some kind of private mission. I’d think you were with them, but I saw how badly you hurt them. You asked me to go somewhere safe with you so you could explain. I’m listening.”

I nodded, trying to find the right words to begin. “You know this has to do with your father.”

“Those men told me he had something they wanted.”

“Yes, and they think you have it now.”

“I don’t know why they would think that.”

I looked at her. “I think you do.”

“Think what you want.”

“You know what’s wrong with this picture, Midori? Three men are waiting for you in your apartment, they rough you up a little, I appear out of nowhere and rough them up a lot, none of this exactly an average day in the life of a jazz pianist, and the whole time you’ve never once suggested that you want to go to the police.”

She didn’t answer.

“Do you want to? You can, you know.”

She sat facing me, her nostrils flaring slightly, her fingers drumming along the edge of the bed.
Goddamnit,
I thought,
what does she know that she hasn’t been telling me?

“Tell me about your father, Midori. Please. I can’t help you if you don’t.”

She leaped off the bed and faced me squarely. “Tell you?” she spat. “No, you tell me! Tell me who the fuck you are, or I swear I will go to the police, and I don’t care what happens after that!”

Progress, of a sort,
I thought. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything!”

“Okay.”

“Starting with, who were those men in my apartment?”

“Okay.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know who they are.”

“But you knew they were there?”

She was going to pull hard at that loose thread until the entire fabric unraveled. I didn’t know how to get around it. “Yes.”

“How?”

“Because your apartment is bugged.”

“Because my apartment is bugged . . . Are you with those men?”

“No.”

“Would you please stop giving me one-word answers? Okay, my apartment is bugged, by who, by you?”

There it was. “Yes.”

She looked at me for a long beat, then sat back down on the bed. “Who do you work for?” she asked, her voice flat.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Another long beat, and the same flat tone: “Then tell me what you want.”

I looked at her, wanting her to see my eyes. “I want to make sure you don’t get hurt.”

Her face was expressionless. “And you’re going to do that by . . .”

“These people are coming after you because they think you have something that could harm them. I don’t know what. But as long as they think you have it, you’re not going to be safe.”

“But if I were to just give whatever it is to you . . .”

“Without knowing what the thing is, I don’t even know if giving it to me would help. I told you, I’m not here for whatever it is. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Can’t you see what this looks like from my perspective? ‘Just hand it over so I can help you.’ ”

“I understand that.”

“I’m not sure you do.”

“Doesn’t matter. Tell me about your father.”

There was a long pause. I knew what she was going to say, and she said it: “This is why you were asking all those questions before. You came to Alfie and, God, everything . . . You’ve just been using me from the beginning.”

“Some of what you’re saying is true. Not all of it. Now tell me about your father.”

“No.”

I felt a flush of anger in my neck.
Easy, John.
“The reporter was asking, too, wasn’t he? Bulfinch? What did you tell him?”

She looked at me, trying to gauge just how much I knew. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I looked at the door and thought,
Walk away. Just walk away.

But instead: “Listen to me, Midori. All I have to do is walk out that door. You’re the one who won’t be able to sleep in her own apartment, who’s afraid to go to the police, who can’t go back to her life. So you figure out a way to work with me on this, or you can damn well figure it all out on your own.”

A long time, maybe a full minute, passed. Then she said, “Bulfinch told me my father was supposed to deliver something to him on the morning he died, but that Bulfinch never got it. He wanted to know if I had it, or if I knew where it was.”

“What was it?”

“A computer disk. That’s all he would tell me. He told me if he said more it would put me in danger.”

“He had already compromised you just by talking to you. He was being followed outside of Alfie.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “Do you know anything about this disk?”

“No.”

I looked at her, trying to judge. “I don’t think I have to tell you, the people who want it aren’t particularly restrained about the methods they’ll use to get it.”

“I understand that.”

“Okay, let’s put together what we have. Everyone thinks your father told you something, or gave you something. Did he? Did he tell you anything, or give you some documents, maybe, anything that he said was important?”

“No. Nothing I remember.”

“Try. A safe-deposit key? A locker key? Did he tell you that he had hidden something, or that he had important papers somewhere? Anything like that?”

“No,” she said, after a moment. “Nothing.”

She might be holding back, I knew. She certainly had reason not to trust me.

“But you know something,” I said. “Otherwise, you’d go to the police.”

She folded her arms across her chest and looked at me.

“For Christ’s sake, Midori, tell me. Let me help you.”

“It’s not what you’re hoping for,” she said.

“I’m not hoping for anything. Just what pieces you can give me.”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “I told you my father and I were . . . estranged for a long time. It started when I was a teenager, when I started to understand Japan’s political system, and my father’s place in it.”

She got up and began to pace around the room, not looking at me. “He was part of the Liberal Democratic Party machine, working his way up the ladder in the old Kensetsusho, the Ministry of Construction. When the Kensetsusho became the Kokudokotsusho, he was made vice minister of land and infrastructure—of public works. Do you know what that means in Japan?”

“I know a little. The public-works program channels money from the politicians and construction firms to the
yakuza.
”

“And the
yakuza
provide ‘protection,’ dispute resolution, and lobbying for the construction industry. The construction companies and
yakuza
are like twins separated at birth. Did you know that construction outfits in Japan are called
gumi
?”

Gumi
means “gang,” or “organization”—the same
moniker the
yakuza
gangs use for themselves. The original
gumi
were groups of men displaced by World War II who worked for a gang boss doing whatever dirty jobs they could to survive. Eventually these gangs morphed into today’s
yakuza
and construction outfits.

“I know,” I said.

“Then you know that, after the war, there were battles between construction companies that were so big the police were afraid to intervene. A bid-rigging system was established to stop these fights. The system still exists. My father ran it.”

She laughed. “Remember in 1994 when Kansai International Airport was built in Osaka? The airport cost fourteen billion dollars, and everyone wanted a piece of it. Remember how Takumi Masaru, the Yamaguchi Gumi
yakuza
boss, was murdered that year? It was for not sharing enough of the profits from the airport construction. My father ordered his death to appease the other gang bosses.”

“Christ, Midori,” I said quietly. “Your father told you these things?”

“When he learned he was terminal. He needed to confess.”

I waited for her to go on.

“The
yakuza
with tattoos and sunglasses, the ones you see in the bad sections of Shinjuku, they’re just tools for people like my father,” she said, continuing her slow pacing. “These people are part of a system. The politicians vote for useless public works that feed the construction companies. The construction companies allow politicians to use company staff as
‘volunteers’ during election campaigns. Construction Ministry bureaucrats are given postretirement ‘advisor’ jobs at construction companies—just a car and driver and other perks, but no work. Every year during budget season, officials from the Ministry of Finance and the Construction Ministry meet with politicians loyal to the industry to decide how to divvy up the pie.”

She stopped pacing and looked at me. “Do you know that Japan has four percent of the land area and half the population of America, but spends a third more on public works? Some people think that in the last ten years ten
trillion
yen of government money have been paid to the
yakuza
through public works.”

Ten trillion?
I thought.
That’s maybe a hundred billion dollars. Bastards have been holding out on you.

“I know about some of this, sure,” I told her. “Your father was going to blow the whistle?”

“Yes. When he was diagnosed, he called me. It was the first time we had talked in over a year. He told me he had to talk to me about something important, and he came over to my apartment. We hadn’t talked in so long, I was thinking it was something about his health, about his heart. He looked older when I saw him and I knew I was right, or almost right.

“I made us tea, and we sat across from each other at the small table in my kitchen. I told him about the music I was working on, but of course I could never ask him about his work, and there was almost nothing for us to talk about. Finally I said, ‘Papa, what is it?’

“ ‘Taishita koto jaa nai,’
he told me. ‘Nothing big.’ Then he looked at me and smiled, his eyes warm but
sad, and for a second he looked to me the way he had when I was a little girl. ‘I found out this week that I don’t have very long to live,’ he said to me, ‘not very long at all. A month, maybe two. Longer if I choose to suffer from radiation and drugs, which I don’t wish to do. The strange thing is that when I heard this news it didn’t bother me, or even surprise me very much.’ Then his eyes filled up, which I had never seen before. He said, ‘What bothered me wasn’t losing my life, but knowing that I had already lost my daughter.’ ”