Rain Fall (31 page)

I ordered the
chukadon
—Chinese vegetables over rice—and ate while I watched the street through the window. Two
sarariman,
taking a late lunch break, also supped alone and in silence.

I had told Bulfinch that, at 2:00, he should start circling the block counterclockwise at 19-3 Akasaka Mitsuke san-chome. There were more than a dozen alleys accessing that particular block, each with multiple tributaries, so he wouldn’t know where I’d be waiting until I made my presence known. It didn’t matter if he came early. He’d just have to keep circling the block in the rain. He didn’t know where I’d be.

I finished at 1:50, paid the check, and left. Keeping the canopy of the umbrella low over my head, I crossed the Esplanade to Misuji-dori, then cut into an alley opposite the Buon Appetito restaurant on the 19-3 block and waited under the overhang of some rusting corrugated roofing. Because of the hour and the weather, the area was quiet. I waited and watched sad drops of water falling in a slow rhythm from the rusted roof onto the tops of dilapidated plastic refuse containers beneath.

After about ten minutes I heard footsteps on the wet brick behind me, and a moment later Bulfinch appeared. He was wearing an olive trench coat and hunkering down under a large black umbrella. From
where I was standing he couldn’t see me, and I waited until he had passed before speaking.

“Bulfinch. Over here,” I said quietly.

“Shit!” he said, turning to face me. “Don’t do that. You scared me.”

“You’re alone?”

“Of course. You brought the disk?”

I stepped out from under the roofing and observed the alley in both directions. All clear. “It’s nearby. Tell me what you plan to do with it.”

“You know what I plan to do. I’m a reporter. I’m going to write a series of stories with whatever’s on there as corroboration.”

“How long will that take?”

“How long? Hell, the stories are already written. All I need is the proof.”

I considered. “Let me tell you a few things about the disk,” I said, and explained about the encryption.

“Not a problem,” he said when I was done. “
Forbes
has a relationship with Lawrence Livermore. They’ll help us. As soon as it’s cracked, we publish.”

“You know that every day that goes by without that publication, Midori’s life is in danger.”

“Is that why you’re giving it to me? The people who want it would have paid you for it. Quite a lot, you know.”

“I want you to understand something,” I said. “If you were to fail to publish what’s on that disk, your failure might cost Midori her life. If that were to happen, I would find you, and I would kill you.”

“I believe you.”

I looked at him a moment longer, then reached into
my breast pocket and took out the disk. I handed it to him and walked back to the station.

I ran an SDR to Shinbashi, thinking about Tatsu on the way. Until the contents of the disk were published, it wasn’t just Midori who was in danger, I knew; it was also Tatsu. And while Tatsu was no soft target, he wasn’t bulletproof, either. It had been a lot of years since I had seen him, but we had covered each other’s backs once. I owed him a heads-up at least.

I called the Keisatsucho from a pay phone at Shinbashi Station. “Do you know who this is?” I asked in English after they had put me through to him.

There was a long pause.
“Ei, hisashiburi desu ne.”
Yes, it’s been a long time. Then he switched to English—a good sign, because it meant he didn’t want the people around him to understand. “Do you know that the Keisatsucho found two bodies in Sengoku? One of them had been carrying a cane. Your fingerprints were on it. I’ve wondered from time to time whether you were still in Tokyo.”

Damn,
I thought,
must have grabbed the cane at some point without even realizing it.
My fingerprints were on file from the time I returned to Japan after the war—I was technically a foreigner, and all foreigners in Japan get fingerprinted.

“We tried to locate you,” he went on, “but you seemed to have vanished. So I think I understand why you’re calling, but there is nothing I can do for you. The best thing you can do now is to come to the Keisatsucho. If you do, you know I will do everything I can do to help you. You make yourself look guilty by running.”

“That’s why I’m calling, Tatsu. I’ve got information about this matter that I want to give to you.”

“In exchange for what?”

“For you doing something about it. Listen to what I’m saying, Tatsu. This isn’t about me. If you act on the information I’ve got, I’ll turn myself in afterwards. I’ll have nothing to be afraid of.”

“Where and when?” he asked.

“Are we alone on this line?” I asked.

“Are you suggesting that this line could be tapped?” he asked, and I recognized the old subversive sarcasm in his voice. He was telling me to assume that it was.

“Okay, good,” I said. “Lobby of the Hotel Okura, next Saturday, noon sharp.” The Okura was a ridiculously public place to meet, and Tatsu would know that I would never seriously suggest it.

“Ah, that’s a good place,” he answered, telling me he understood. “I’ll see you then.”

“You know, Tatsu, it sounds crazy, but sometimes I miss the times we had in Vietnam. I miss those useless weekly briefings we used to have to go to—do you remember?”

The CIA head of the task force that ran the briefings invariably scheduled them for 16:30, leaving him plenty of time afterwards to chase prostitutes through Saigon. Tatsu rightly thought the guy was a joke, and wasn’t shy about pointing it out publicly.

“Yes, I remember,” he said.

“For some reason I was especially missing them just now,” I said, getting ready to give him the day to add to the time. “Wished I had one to attend
tomorrow, in fact. Isn’t that strange? I’m getting nostalgic in my old age.”

“That happens.”

“Yeah, well. It’s been a long time. I’m sorry we lost touch the way we did. Tokyo’s changed so much since I first got here. We had some pretty good times back then, didn’t we? I used to love that one place we used to go to, the one where the mama-san made pottery that she used to serve the drinks in. Remember it? It’s probably not even there anymore.”

The place was in Ebisu. “It’s gone,” he said, telling me he understood.

“Well,
shoganai, ne
?” That’s life. “It was a good place. I think of it sometimes.”

“I strongly advise you to come in. If you do, I promise to do everything I can to help.”

“I’ll think about it. Thanks for the advice.” I hung up then, my hand lingering on the receiver, willing him to understand my cryptic message. I didn’t know what I was going to do if he didn’t.

T
HE PLACE
I’
D
mentioned in Ebisu was a classic Japanese
izakaya
that Tatsu had introduced me to when I came to Japan after the war.
Izakaya
are tiny bars in old wooden buildings, usually run by an ageless man or woman, or a couple, who lives over the store, with only a red lantern outside the entrance to advertise their existence. Offering refuge from a demanding boss or a tedious marriage, from the tumult of the subways and the noise of the streets,
izakaya
serve beer and sake long into the night, as an endless procession of customers take and abandon seats at the bar, always to be replaced by another tired man coming in from the cold.

Tatsu and I had spent a lot of time at the place in Ebisu, but I had stopped going there once we lost touch. I kept meaning to drop by and check in on the mama-san, but the months had turned to years and somehow it just never happened. And now, according to Tatsu, the place wasn’t even there anymore. Probably it had been torn down. No room for a little place like that in brash, modern Tokyo.

But I remembered where it had been, and that’s where I would wait for Tatsu.

I got to Ebisu early to give myself a chance to look around. Things had really changed. So many of the wooden buildings were gone. There was a sparkling new shopping mall near the station—used to be a rice field. It made it a little hard to get my bearings.

I headed east from the station. It was a wet day, the wind blowing mist from an overcast sky.

I found the place where the
izakaya
had been. The dilapidated but cozy building was gone, replaced by an antiseptic-looking convenience store. I strolled past it slowly. It was empty, the sole occupant a bored-looking clerk reading a magazine under the store’s fluorescent lights. No sign of Tatsu, but I was nearly an hour early.

I wouldn’t have come back, if I’d had an alternative, once I knew the place was gone. Hell, the whole neighborhood was gone. It reminded me of the last time I’d been in the States, about five years before. I’d gone back to Dryden, the closest thing I had to a hometown. I hadn’t been back in almost twenty years, and some part of me wanted to connect again, with something.

It was a four-hour drive north from New York City. I got there, and about the only thing that was the same was the layout of the streets. I drove up the main drag, and instead of the things I remembered I saw a McDonald’s, a Benetton, a Kinko’s Copies, a Subway sandwich shop, all in gleaming new buildings. A couple of places I recognized. They were like the ruins of a lost civilization poking through dense jungle overgrowth.

I walked on, marveling at how once-pleasant memories always seemed to be rendered painful by an alchemy I could never quite comprehend.

I turned onto a side street. A small park was wedged between two nondescript buildings. A couple of young mothers were standing by one of the benches, strollers in front of them, chatting. Probably about goings-on in the neighborhood, how the kids were going to be in school soon.

I circled around behind the new shopping mall, then came back through it, along a wide outdoor esplanade bright with chrome and glass. It was a pretty structure, I had to admit. A couple of high-school kids passed me, laughing. They looked comfortable, like they belonged there.

I saw a figure in an old gray trench coat coming toward me from the other end of the plaza, and although I couldn’t make out the face I recognized the gait, the posture. It was Tatsu, sucking a little warmth from a cigarette, otherwise ignoring the damp day.

He saw me and waved, tossing away the cigarette. As he came closer I saw that his face was more deeply lined than I remembered, a weariness somehow closer to the surface.

“Honto ni, shibaraku buri da na,”
I said, offering him a bow. It has been a long time. He extended his hand, and I shook it.

He was looking at me closely, no doubt seeing the same lines on my face that I saw on his, and perhaps something more. This was the first time Tatsu had seen me since my plastic surgery. He must have been wondering at how age seemed to have hidden the
Caucasian in my features. I wondered if he suspected something besides the passage of time behind my changed appearance.

“Rain-san,
ittai,
what have you done this time?” he asked, still looking at me. “Do you know how much trouble it will mean if someone finds out that I’ve met you without arresting you? You are a suspect in a double murder. In which one of the victims was well connected in the LDP. I am under substantial pressure to solve this, you know.”

“Tatsu, aren’t you even going to tell me it’s good to see me? I have feelings, you know.”

He smiled his sorrowful smile. “You know it’s good to see you. But I would wish for different circumstances.”

“How are your daughters?”

The smile broadened, and he nodded his head proudly. “Very fine. One doctor. One lawyer. Luckily they have their mother’s brains,
ne
?”

“Married?”

“The older is engaged.”

“Congratulations. Sounds like you’ll be a grandfather soon.”

“Not too soon,” he said, the smile evaporating, and I thought
I’d hate to be the kid Tatsu caught fooling around with one of his daughters.

We headed back across the mall, past a perfect reproduction French château that looked homesick in its current surroundings.

The small talk done, I got to the point. “Yamaoto Toshi, head of Conviction, has put a contract out on your life,” I told him.

He stopped walking and looked at me. “How do you know this?”

“Sorry, no questions about how.”

He nodded. “Your source must be credible, or you wouldn’t be telling me.”

“Yes.”

We started walking again. “You know, Rain-san, there are a lot of people who would like to see me dead. Sometimes I wonder how I’ve managed to keep breathing for all this time.”

“Maybe you’ve got a guardian angel.”

He laughed. “I wish that were so. Actually, the explanation is simpler. My death would establish my credibility. Alive, I can be dismissed as a fool, a chaser of phantoms.”

“I’m afraid circumstances have changed.”

He stopped again and looked at me closely. “I didn’t know you were mixed up with Yamaoto.”

“I’m not.”

He was nodding his head, and I knew that he was adding this bit of data to his profile of the mysterious assassin.