Tokyo Underworld (32 page)

‘In any other country in the world I would have won hands down,’ he would rage darkly. ‘Ghana. Timbuktu. No problem. But here? Never.’

If he had not had his stroke, he mused, things might have turned out differently. In the Nihon Kotsu appeal, the legal team of four lawyers he had assembled over the course of that case had adopted a new approach, arguing that his flagship restaurant, including the building in which it was housed and the land on which it stood, should
all
be returned because their combined value had multiplied over the years to an amount far, far in excess of their worth at the time of the takeover. The increase was so great, their brief stated,
that it was now impossible to claim that seizure of the property constituted fair repayment of the original loan.

After four years of plodding through appellate court, it seemed to Nick, at least, the judge might actually be buying that argument – if the sympathetic looks he was getting from the berobed figure on the bench were any indication. It was a view, it might be noted, that was not wholeheartedly shared by his counsel. But then Nicola went into a hospital in central Tokyo for minor surgery to correct a bad back that was hampering his golf game and suffered a bizarre heart attack, which served to hopelessly confuse his situation.

It had come on a warm night in June 1986. He had been lying down in his expensive second-story hospital suite, thinking about the operation scheduled for the following morning, when suddenly he began to perspire and tremble; he felt a terrible pain in his chest and was overcome by a wave of nausea. He got up and went into the bathroom where he was racked by alternating bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. When he finally came out, pale and shaken, he looked out the window and what he saw caused him to rub his eyes in disbelief. There, bathed in the moonlight, he later told friends, was a rider on a black horse coming through the front gate of the hospital grounds, heading up the driveway toward the main entrance. The rider was wearing armor, like the knights of old, and his face visor was down. He was holding a sword in one hand and a deck of black cards in the other, which he began flinging in Nick’s direction, one by one. Clearly visible in the dim light was the English word ‘Death’ scrawled in yellow ink on each card.

‘So this is death,’ Nick muttered to himself, wondering at the same time what a medieval English knight was doing in a twentieth-century Tokyo apparition.

‘Well, I’m not ready to die just yet,’ he said aloud.

The rider kept coming.

‘Fuck you, death!’ he yelled out the window. ‘Go to hell.’

He stood there cursing. Then suddenly the figure vanished.

Nick got back into bed and pressed the call button.

Soon the room was filled with doctors, more nurses and equipment. A grim-looking Japanese heart specialist examined him and informed him he had had not one but two myocardial infarctions, which had caused 75 percent of his heart muscles to stop. He was immediately moved to the intensive care unit, where he was dosed with glycerine pills and told to keep as quiet as humanly possible.

Nick thought he was probably going to die. So, it appeared, did everyone else. His wife, his son Vince, who came the next day, the entire medical team – they all had that
look
on their faces. The chief of his legal team had even showed up to see him. He sat by the edge of Nick’s bed and said, ‘I can get you a settlement of 5
oku
– 500 million yen right now.’

Nick stared at him dully. He’d been fading in and out of consciousness.

‘Plus legal fees,’ the lawyer added.

Nick grunted.

‘All right,’ he managed to say weakly.

The figure the chief lawyer had cited – at the time the equivalent of roughly $4 million – was but a fraction of the total value of the property. But Nick had been thinking about something else. In his twilight zone haze, it occurred to him that it might be possible to use the Nihon Kotsu offer in court as evidence against the defendants. If they were willing to give up that kind of money – insufficient as it may have seemed to him – to settle the case, then, he asked himself, wasn’t that an indication in itself that the defendants believed deep down in their hearts of hearts that they were wrong and owed something to the plaintiff?

That was what Nick’s ‘all right’ had meant.

‘All right’ as in ‘All right! Now we can get those bastards.’

Of course, Nick’s legal chief had an entirely different take on the conversation. He was increasingly of the opinion the case was unwinnable and that reaching such a harmonious conclusion would constitute a major feat of legal skill on his part. He believed
he was doing his client a huge favor by convincing the other side to settle. However, since no one could read Nick’s mind and Nick was incapable of uttering much more than a few unintelligible grunts at a time, no one disputed the ‘agreement’. And thus while Nick was still bedridden, his fourth wife used his company seal to approve the contracts and the money was paid.

Much to everyone’s surprise, Nick began to recover. And when he was well enough to realize what had really happened, instead of being grateful as his lawyer had anticipated, he was livid – or as livid as his delicate medical condition allowed him to be. He accused his lawyers of selling him out, of striking a quick deal to get their money before he bit the dust. He had had a chance for victory, he rasped, but the goddamn lawyers had snatched it from him.

The matter of legal fees was the breaking point. Nick had been given a bill of 15 million yen by his legal chief, which he interpreted as payment for his entire team of four lawyers. This was on top of a retainer of five million yen a year he had already been paying them all in toto. (That was the system in Japan. One paid retainers. Then one paid legal fees, which were decided after a settlement was reached.) But the chief counsel said no – the 15 million applied only to him. There would be more invoices coming from the desks of the others and that was between them and Zappetti.

The subsequent bills were perhaps not unreasonable in the Japanese context, but Nick was in no mood to listen. He refused to pay a single yen more. His legal chief took him to arbitration, while the other attorneys flat out sued him – three separate suits, one after the other, for several million yen. For a lawyer to unilaterally sue his client was almost unheard of in Japan. But Nicola Koizumi had managed to make it happen. Three times. He could have written a manual on ways to get into trouble.

Nick’s health eventually improved to the point where he was able to leave the hospital, but he was not exactly in peak condition
for courtroom warfare. He had a hacking cough. He needed to use a cane to walk because one of his legs had atrophied, and he was popping glycerine pills like candy to control what was literally only half a pulse. His doctor had told him that if he ever really lost control of his temper, he ran the risk of blowing out what remained of his heart. His blood pressure would rise, his heart would expand, and – poof! Sayonara Nick-san.

He had also managed to lose most of the vision in his left eye with the assistance of the staff at aging prewar Toranomon Hospital, the venerated caregiver to Tokyo’s diplomatic corps. A few months before his heart attack, doctors there had diagnosed him with diabetes; they informed him he had ‘blood on his eyeballs’, that the capillaries around the edge of each eye had become brittle from high sugar content, and that he would need laser treatments to cauterize the veins. Under doctor’s orders, he began making regular visits to the Toranomon laser room – from which he would stagger each time, seeing blurred spots of red, yellow, and blue for the rest of the day.

During one session, a junior technician had unwittingly trained the laser beam directly on the retina of Nick’s left eye. The slip created an instant blind spot – a missing center of vision in the orb. After that fateful afternoon, if Nick looked at someone’s face with his right eye closed, the person’s nose was blocked out – like the genitalia in a censored pornographic movie – and the area around it fringed with colored polka dots.

The vision in his right eye had also deteriorated. In optical tests, he could barely make out the top line of the chart. To read a newspaper, he needed a magnifying glass. He was forced to wear an audio watch – one with a computerized voice that announced the time – because he was unable to read a conventional timepiece. Driving a car was totally out of the question.

When the expurgated vision in his left eye failed to improve, he complained to the doctor, who conducted an internal investigation and reported back, huffily, that his staff had done nothing wrong.
It was the patient who had moved his retina into the path of the beam, not vice versa. The hospital was, therefore, not responsible.

How things had changed, Nick thought. In the old days, back when he was The King, the hospital would have come up with a new eye for him. But not anymore. Now, it was Fuck you,
gaijin
. He toyed with the idea of suing the hospital, but he was running out of energy. He did not think he could handle any more law suits, especially one he probably wouldn’t win. In fact, he had growing doubts about his ability to withstand his present legal calendar, busy as it had once again become.

‘I’m coasting on the gasoline fumes in the tank,’ he would croak. ‘I can’t get it up anymore. It’s just a question of time until I keel over.’

But then he appeared before the judge in 1990 to hear the formal reading of the first complaint against him – ‘Failure to pay ex-lawyer 15 million yen for settling the case, as agreed’ – and he felt a reawakening of resolve. ‘Settling the case?!’ The dirty son of a bitch had some nerve. His heart began to beat faster as he sat there. He could feel the expansion. He clenched his fists, took a few deep breaths, and swallowed a glycerine pill.

The newly hired Japanese counsel, a young attorney not long out of law school, scribbled him a note in English which urged him to keep his calm, to answer all questions posed to him rationally, and to avoid making his usual remarks like, ‘I was blackmailed,’ or ‘My money was hijacked.’

Nick read it twice, then popped another glycerine pill.

All right, he
would
keep his cool, if that’s what it took. And to start things off, he would also scare the piss out of the cutthroat sons of bitches – that very day. He would teach the Japanese legal profession what it meant to mess with Nick Zappetti. At eight o’clock in the evening, he took a cab to his erstwhile attorney’s downtown office. He limped down the dimly lit and deserted marble hallway, stopped at the glass door that bore the name of his legal firm in black stenciled letters. He turned the knob and slowly
opened the door. The outer office was in shadows, but he could see lights and hear voices coming from an inner conference room. He rang the bell and in short order one of the men appeared. Nick smiled at him, malevolently, through the gloom.

‘How do you like the way I come here and visit you? Eh?’ he said, tapping his cane on the floor. ‘One of these days somebody is going to come here like this and kill you – before you know what’s happening. So from now on you better lock your door and be careful how you open it – especially at night.’

He was pleased to see the man cringe and take a step back.

It seemed to him he had lost everything to the Japanese. Once he had had nine different restaurants. Now all he had was the Roppongi Crossing branch, where he spent his afternoons and evenings commiserating with fellow expatriates. His wife now operated three Nicola’s. Her sister ran one more. And the rest of the Nicola empire, including the old flagship building in Gazembocho and several other small-sized restaurants around town, belonged to his one-time Japanese partner, Nihon Kotsu. Their menus were even inscribed with ‘Nicola’s, since 1956’.

Oh, the slings and arrows.

He calculated that had he been able to keep everything – all his restaurants, all his land, all his buildings – he would have been worth a billion dollars, bare minimum. That, as he liked to note, was the equivalent of the entire budget of the United Nations. The value of all the property he had lost in Roppongi alone came to nearly $500 million in 1990 prices. Add to that an annual gross of several million dollars over thirty-five years in service revenue and accounts receivable and he’d be in Ross Perot territory.

Now, however, someone else was the beneficiary of his labors. He had less than $1 million in the bank and only two houses – a new four-bedroom 10,000-square-meter place he had bought with the Nihon Kotsu settlement, and a $700,000 home in Hawaii. In Nick’s view of the world, he was nearly poverty stricken.

What was happening to him after some forty-five years in Japan
was not unlike what was happening to the United States in its relations with Japan.

Now that the Japanese possessed half the world’s money, they were spending it on buying up America, reeling in many high-profile American properties: the Rockefeller Center, Columbia Pictures, Universal-MCA, Pebble Beach, and the Riviera Club, among others. Even ordinary office girls found themselves able to buy condominiums in Hawaii and New York. Japanese tourism to the United States had also exploded with millions of travelers annually invading the West Coast or New York City, where they stayed in Japanese-owned hotels, ate at Japanese restaurants, rode on Japanese-owned buses, and bought their souvenirs in Japanese-run trinket shops (many, incidentally, run by yakuza groups). Hawaii was jokingly referred to in some circles as Japan’s forty-eighth prefecture; California as her forty-ninth. Fifth Avenue was starting to look like the Ginza.

America’s reduced status in Japanese eyes was beginning to be reflected in the eyes of Japan’s leaders. ‘Lazy and illiterate’ was what the speaker of the Japanese parliament had only recently termed the Americans, while Nakasone had termed their intelligence level ‘low’. (Even Nick’s own son had joined the enemy camp, so to speak. ‘Who’s Nicola?’ he once said dismissively, referring to the Roppongi operation. ‘Who knows you now?’)

As American complaints about ‘unfair trade’ escalated, accordingly, the intensity of emotion surrounding matters of international commerce between Japan and America was ratcheted up to all-time highs. In 1989, for example, a famous article on trade in the
Bungei Shunju
bore the indignant title ‘
Warui No Wa America!
’ (‘It’s America That’s Bad!’). A year later Dietman Shintaro Ishihara’s saber-rattling polemic,
The Japan That Can Say No
, urging that Japan stand up to the United States, sold a million copies, as did two sequels in the early 1990s. A noted Japanese
psychiatrist, summing up the national mood, likened America to a bullying corporate executive driven by some inner psychotic need to intimidate his subordinates and declared that America, as a whole, was suffering from a disease called obsessive neuropathy.