Rain Fall (22 page)

He shifted in his seat. “I see your point. But I’m not going to be comfortable talking about this unless I see Midori.”

I considered for a moment. “Are you carrying a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Show it to me.”

He reached into the left side of the blazer and withdrew a small flip-top unit.

“That’s fine,” I said. “Go ahead and put it back in your pocket.” As he did so, I pulled out a pen and small sheet of paper from my own jacket pocket and started jotting down instructions. My gut told me he wasn’t wired, but no one’s gut is infallible.

“Until I say otherwise, under no circumstances do I want to see you reaching for that phone,” my note read. “We’ll walk out of the restaurant together. When we step outside, stop so I can pat you down for weapons. After that, go where I motion you to go. At some point I’ll let you know that I want you to start walking ahead, and at some point I’ll tell you where we’re going. If you have questions now, write them down. If you don’t, just hand back this note. Starting now, do not say a word unless I speak first.”

I extended the note to him. He took it with one hand while slipping on his glasses with the other. When he was done reading, he pushed it across the table to me and nodded.

I folded the note up and put it back in my jacket pocket, followed by the pen. Then I placed a thousand-yen note on the table to cover the coffee I had been drinking and motioned him to leave.

We got up and walked outside. I patted him down and was unsurprised to find that he was clean. As we moved down the street I was careful to keep him slightly in front of me and to the side, a human shield if it came to that. I knew every good spot in the area for surveillance or an ambush, and my head swept back and forth, looking for someone out of place, someone who might have followed Bulfinch to the restaurant and then set up to wait outside it.

As we walked I called out “left” or “right” from behind him by way of directions, and we made our way to the Spiral Building. We walked through the glass doors and into the music section, where Midori was waiting.

“Kawamura-san,” he said, bowing, when he saw her. “Thank you for your call.”

“Thank you for coming to meet me,” Midori replied. “I’m afraid I wasn’t completely candid with you when we met for coffee. I’m not as ignorant of my father’s affiliations as I led you to believe. But I don’t know anything about the disk you mentioned. No more than you told me, anyway.”

“I’m not sure what I can do for you, then,” he said.

“Tell us what’s on the disk,” I replied.

“I don’t see how that would help you.”

“I don’t see how it could hurt us,” I answered. “Right now we’re running blind. If we put our heads together, we’ve got a much better chance of retrieving the disk than we do if we work separately.”

“Please, Mr. Bulfinch,” Midori said. “I barely escaped being killed a few days ago by whoever is trying to find that disk. I need your help.”

Bulfinch grimaced and looked at Midori and then at me, his eyes sweeping back and forth several times. “All right,” he said after a moment. “Two months ago your father contacted me. He told me he read my column for
Forbes.
He told me who he was and said he wanted to help. A classic whistle-blower.”

Midori turned to me. “That was about the time he was diagnosed.”

“I’m sorry?” Bulfinch asked.

“Lung cancer. He had just learned that he had little time to live,” Midori said.

Bulfinch nodded, understanding. “I see. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

Midori bowed her head briefly, accepting his solicitude. “Please, go on.”

“Over the course of the next month I had several clandestine meetings with your father, during which he briefed me extensively on corruption in the Construction Ministry and its role as broker between the Liberal Democratic Party and the
yakuza.
These briefings provided me with invaluable insight into the nature and extent of corruption in Japanese society. But I needed corroboration.”

“What corroboration?” I asked. “Can’t you just print it and attribute it to ‘a senior source in the Construction Ministry’?”

“Ordinarily, yes,” Bulfinch replied. “But there were two problems here. First, Kawamura’s position in the Ministry gave him unique access to the information he was providing me. If we had published the information, we might as well have used his name in the by-line.”

“And the second problem?” Midori asked.

“Impact,” Bulfinch answered. “We’ve already run a half dozen exposés on the kind of corruption Kawamura was involved in. The Japanese press resolutely refuses to pick them up. Why? Because the politicians and bureaucrats pass and interpret laws that can make or break domestic corporations. And the corporations provide over half the media’s advertising revenues. So if, for example, a newspaper runs an article that offends a politician, the politician calls his contacts at the relevant corporations, who pull their advertising from the newspaper and transfer it to a rival publication, and the offending paper goes bankrupt. You see?

“If you have a reporter investigate a story from outside the government-sponsored
kisha
news clubs, you get shut down. If you play ball, the money keeps rolling in, licit and illicit. No one here takes chances; everyone treats the truth like a contagious disease. Christ, Japan’s press is the most docile in the world.”

“But with proof . . . ?” I asked.

“Hard proof would change everything. The papers would be forced to cover the story or else reveal that they are nothing but tools of the government. And flushing the corrupt kingpins out into the open would weaken them and embolden the press. We could start a virtuous cycle that would lead to a change in Japanese politics the likes of which the country hasn’t seen since the Meiji restoration.”

“I think you may be overestimating the zeal of domestic media,” Midori said.

Bulfinch shook his head. “Not at all. I know some of these people well. They’re good reporters, they want to publish. But they’re realists, too.”

“The proof,” I said. “What was it?”

Bulfinch looked at me over the tops of his wireless glasses. “I don’t know exactly. Only that it’s hard evidence. Incontrovertible.”

“It sounds like that disk should go to the Keisatsucho, not the press,” Midori said, referring to Tatsu’s investigative organization.

“Your father wouldn’t have lasted a day if he’d handed that information over to the feds,” I said, saving Bulfinch the trouble.

“That’s right,” Bulfinch said. “Your father wasn’t the
first person to try to blow the whistle on corruption. Ever hear of Honma Tadayo?”

Ah, yes, Honma-san. A sad story.

Midori shook her head.

“When Nippon Credit Bank went bankrupt in 1998,” Bulfinch went on, “at least thirty-six billion dollars, and probably much more, of its one-hundred-thirty-three-billion-dollar loan portfolio had gone bad. The bad loans were linked to the underworld, even to illegal payments to North Korea. To clean up the mess, a consortium of rescuers hired Honma Tadayo, the respected former director of the Bank of Japan. Honma-san became president of NCB in early September and started working through the bank’s books, trying to bring to light the full extent of its bad debts and understand where and why they had been extended in the first place.

“Honma lasted two weeks. He was found hanged in an Osaka hotel room, with notes addressed to his family, company, and others nearby. His body was quickly cremated, without an autopsy, and the Osaka police ruled the death a suicide without even conducting an investigation.

“And Honma wasn’t an isolated event. His death was the seventh ‘suicide’ among ranking Japanese either investigating financial irregularities or due to testify about irregularities since 1997, when the depth of bad loans affecting banks like Nippon Credit first started coming to light. There was also a member of parliament who was about to talk about irregular fund-raising activities, another Bank of Japan director who oversaw small financial institutions, an
investigator at the Financial Supervision Agency, and the head of the small and medium financial institutions division at the Ministry of Finance. Not one of these seven cases resulted in so much as a homicide investigation. The powers that be in this country don’t allow it.”

I thought of Tatsu and his conspiracy theories, my eyes unblinking behind my shades.

“There are rumors of a special outfit within the
yakuza,
” Bulfinch said, taking off his glasses and wiping the lenses on his shirt, “specialists in ‘natural causes,’ who visit victims at night in hotel rooms, force them to write wills at gunpoint, inject them with sedatives, then strangle them in a way that makes it appear that the victim committed suicide by hanging.”

“Have you found any substance to the rumors?” I asked.

“Not yet. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

He held his glasses up above his head and examined them, then returned them to his face. “And I’ll tell you something else. As bad as the problems are in the banks, the Construction Ministry is worse. Construction is the biggest employer in Japan—it puts the rice on one out of every six Japanese tables. The industry is by far the biggest contributor to the LDP. If you want to dig this country’s corruption out by the roots, construction is the place to start. Your father was a brave man, Midori.”

“I know,” she said.

I wondered if she still assumed the heart attack had been from natural causes. The building was starting to feel warm.

“I’ve told you what I know,” Bulfinch said. “Now it’s your turn.”

I looked at him through the shades. “Can you think of any reason that Kawamura would have gone to meet you that morning but not brought the disk?”

Bulfinch paused before saying “No.”

“The plan that morning was definitely to do the handoff?”

“Yes. As I said, we’d had a number of previous deep background meetings. This was the morning Kawamura was going to deliver the goods.”

“Maybe he couldn’t get access to the disk, couldn’t download whatever he was going to download that day, and that’s why he was coming up empty-handed.”

“No. He told me over the phone the day before that he had it. All he had to do was hand it over.”

I felt a flash of insight. I turned to Midori. “Midori, where did your father live?” Of course I already knew, but couldn’t let her know that.

“Shibuya.”

“Which
chome
?”
Chome
are small subdivisions within Tokyo’s various wards.

“San-chome.”

“Top of Dogenzaka, then? Above the station?”

“Yes.”

I turned to Bulfinch. “Where was Kawamura getting on the train that morning?”

“Shibuya JR Station.”

“I’ve got a hunch I’m going to follow up on. I’ll call you if it pans out.”

“Wait just a minute . . . ,” he started to say.

“I know this isn’t comfortable for you,” I said, “but you’re going to have to trust me. I think I can find that disk.”

“How?”

“As I said, I’ve got a hunch.” I started to move toward the door.

“Wait,” he said again. “I’ll go with you.”

I shook my head. “I work alone.”

He took me by the arm and said again, “I’ll go with you.”

I looked at his hand on my arm. After a moment it drifted back to his side.

“I want you to walk out of here,” I told him. “Head in the direction of Omotesando-dori. I’m going to get Midori someplace safe and follow up on my hunch. I’ll be in touch.”

He looked at Midori, clearly at a loss.

“It’s all right,” she said. “We want the same thing you do.”

“I don’t suppose I have much choice,” he said, looking at me with a glare that was meant to convey resentment. But I saw what he was really thinking.

“Mr. Bulfinch,” I said, my voice low, “don’t try to follow me. I would spot you if you did. I would not react as a friend.”

“For Christ’s sake, tell me what you’re thinking. I might be able to help.”

“Remember,” I said, gesturing to the street, “the direction of Omotesando-dori. I’ll be in touch soon.”

“You’d better be,” he said. He took a step closer and looked through the shades and into my eyes, and I had to admire his balls. “You just better.” He gave a nod to
Midori and walked through the glass doors of the Spiral Building and out onto the street.

Midori looked at me and asked, “What’s your hunch?”

“Later,” I said, watching him through the glass. “We need to move now, before he gets a chance to double back and follow one of us. Let’s go.”

We walked out and immediately flagged a cab heading in the direction of Shibuya. I could see Bulfinch, still walking in the other direction, as we got in and drove away.

We got out and separated at Shibuya JR Station. Midori headed back to the hotel while I made my way up Dogenzaka—where Harry and I had followed Kawamura that morning that now seemed like so long ago, where, if my hunch was right, Kawamura had ditched the disk the morning he died.

I was thinking about Kawamura, about his behavior that morning, about what must have been going on in his mind.