“That would be fine. I’ll look forward to it.”
“If I see any yakuza, they better finish me this time.”
“There won’t be any yakuza, or anyone else. This is just you and me.”
I hung up. So far, so good.
My next call was to Tatsu. He’d offered to help me beyond just getting me Kei Takizawa’s information, and I was going to have to take him up on it. “Hey,” I said, when he picked up. “It’s me again.”
There was a pause that made me decidedly uncomfortable. “Why are you calling me?”
I went from decidedly uncomfortable to distinctly on edge. “What do you mean?”
“Kei Takizawa was murdered in her apartment early this morning.”
I felt gut-punched. “Oh, fuck.”
“This time, I’m going to need you to explain your whereabouts.” His voice was cold.
“Damn it, Tatsu. I told her to call you. I told her not to go back to her apartment.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Can you meet right now? I’ll tell you everything.”
Twenty minutes later, we were walking around the pond. I told him what had happened the night before. I told him where I’d stayed, and that the clerk would probably remember me.
“That’s not necessary,” he said. “Forgive me for doubting you. I should have known…you wouldn’t do something like this.”
I wasn’t as certain as he was. But weirdly, I wanted to deserve his confidence.
“I wouldn’t and I didn’t. But I should have known she wouldn’t listen to me. She was out of her mind and told me she didn’t want to go to the cops because most of them are in bed with the yakuza. I should have called you myself and told you to pick her up.”
He sighed. “Well, she was scared, but she wasn’t stupid. Remind me, why do you think Fukumoto Junior had her killed?”
This part was delicate. “She told me Mad Dog is the one who had his old man killed, and that he used her to help make it happen. It sounds like this was just a case of tying up loose ends.”
We walked in silence for a moment. “I don’t think you’re lying to me, Rain-san. But your truth is like the lotuses on this pond. Captivating, certainly, but more than anything they conceal what lies beneath.”
I glanced out at the lotuses, then at him. “That was unusually poetic of you.”
He nodded. “An early morning flight of fancy. Was it inaccurate?”
“All right. I’ll tell you what I know. And then I’m going to ask you another favor. A slightly larger one than last time.”
So I told him. I elided what needed eliding, but he got the drift. Miyamoto I left out entirely, claiming I knew nothing about my bagman counterpart, which would have been expected in any event. Not many bagmen would be stupid enough—or, as it had turned out, fortunate enough—to have struck up the kind of friendship and trust I had with Miyamoto. Naturally, I told him nothing about the service I had performed for Miyamoto, or about my involvement in any of the other killings. He would intuit and suspect much of it, of course, but he’d already told me that as long as I confessed to no crimes, we had an understanding.
“This is potentially explosive,” he said when I was finished. “The CIA, bribing Japanese politicians?”
“I think they conceive of it more as ‘political assistance’ or whatever than as bribes.”
“I’m sure they do. What kind of proof do you have of any of this?”
I had a feeling he would ask. “Virtually none. It’s all done with cash and through cutouts. And before you ask me to go in undercover, number one, the answer is no, and number two is, I’m blown anyway. They’re all after me.”
“All because of the incident at Ueno? Those
chinpira
who jumped you?”
He knew it was bullshit. And he could sense the rest. But I wasn’t going to confirm anything.
“As far as I know.”
We walked in silence again. The sun was up now, and it was beginning to get hot. There were more people around, more sounds of traffic and trains in the distance. The city was stirring itself from slumber.
“What will you do?” he said. “This time, you’ve really pissed off the wrong people.”
“That’s…the favor I need to ask.”
“Yes?”
“Those two yakuza killed on Roppongi-dōri last night—or actually, early this morning. What’s the procedure with the bodies?”
He shrugged. “The bodies were taken to the Jikei Hospital morgue. They’ll be pronounced dead, a forensic pathologist will examine them and file his report, and they’ll be cremated. Why?”
“I need one of them.”
He stopped and looked at me, and for once, his unflappable calm, which always seemed the product of his ability to think faster and see farther ahead, seemed to desert him. He shook his head as though bewildered and said, “For what?”
I told him my plan. “All I need from you,” I said, “is a little help…shaping the way it looks after.”
“You mean a cover-up.”
“That seems like a strong phrase. No one’s going to get hurt. And it seems like a fair trade in exchange for the kind of information I just gave you on CIA payoffs to the LDP.”
“You have no proof of those payoffs.”
“Maybe not, but now that you know about them, and everything else, you’ll know where to find proof. If you want to look for it. I’m not sure it’s a good idea. These people don’t like exposure, I’ve discovered.”
He nodded, watching me.
“What?” I said.
He sighed. “I feel unaccountably sad.”
“Imagine how I feel.”
He offered a small smile. “Do you need money?”
I squeezed his shoulder, touched. “No. I’ve got enough.”
“A passport?”
“That…I could use a little help with. Wouldn’t be a good idea to travel under my own.” I realized I should have thought of a new passport sooner, before it counted. So much had been happening, I hadn’t gamed things out all the way through. I promised I would never let that happen again.
“I can help you with the travel papers. But how long will you stay away?”
“How long do you think I’ll need to?”
“At least a year,” he said, nodding resignedly and sounding like a doctor delivering the diagnosis for a fatal disease. “Probably longer.”
I looked out over the lotuses. The sun was fully visible above them now.
“Well. I’ve always wanted to see the world.”
“Haven’t you seen enough?”
I tried to smile, but it faltered. “Yeah. But I guess I’m going to see a little more.”
chapter
thirty-five
I
spent the day getting to know Jikei Hospital. The
reianshitsu
, the hospital morgue, was in the basement of the sprawling facility. Unlike the bright, windowed, carpeted areas above, obviously intended for public consumption, the basement felt dim and dreary, an afterthought, a relic. Dusty cardboard boxes lined the peeling walls; the tile floor was chipped and cracked; an old wheelchair sat in a corner, a stack of paper folders moldering in its seat. I thought of Sayaka, then shoved the thought away. The overhead florescent lights, cold, inert, and faintly buzzing, seemed only to enhance the gloom rather than dispel it. Hardly an Elysian Fields kind of a sendoff for anyone who wound up here, though I supposed there weren’t many complaints.
I passed several hospital employees while I wandered in the area, and while I was prepared to deal with any inquiries by responding in English as though I were a lost, illiterate, visiting Nisei, no one took any notice of me, much less challenged my presence. Not only did the Jikei morgue lack security, it also plainly lacked security consciousness. Which suited me perfectly.
When I was satisfied I was sufficiently familiar with the layout of the hospital and its grounds, I picked up a few items I thought I would need: lubricant, from a bicycle store; a surgical mask, surgical scrubs, and a white lab coat from a medical supply store; a blanket, hat, spare shoes, and a new shoulder bag, from a discount store. Then I rented a car from a company in Ueno. I told them I needed it for only twenty-four hours, paid a cash deposit, and left Thanatos parked right around the corner. Then I checked the John Smith answering service. Unsurprisingly, there was a message from McGraw. I called him.
“Okay,” he said. “We managed to catch a break.”
It was weird, hearing him use the same phrase with his new go-to guy that he’d used not so long ago with me. “Yes?”
“I’m supposed to meet him at eight o’clock tomorrow morning at Benten Island. Shinobazu Pond, in Ueno Park. Do you know it?”
“I know Ueno Park.”
“The pond’s at the south end, and the island’s in the center of it. You won’t have any trouble finding it. Now, here’s the thing. Rain’s probably expecting this to be a setup. Hell, for all I know, he’s using it to set me up. He’s gotten pretty wise tactically, and I’m expecting him to show up very early. If you want to get to him, I’d advise that you get there at sunup. I imagine he’ll be there not long after to reconnoiter. But he’s going to recognize you, right? Is that a problem? Will it make him suspicious?”
“No. The opposite.”
I could almost hear him smiling. “Good. Well, good hunting. Call me when it’s done.”
Oh, don’t worry about that
, I thought.
I bought a couple of bento lunches, and found a love hotel in Shinbashi. I ate, showered, and tried to get some sleep. It wouldn’t come. The gulf between what had been my hopes, and the reality that had exposed those hopes as daydream and delusion, was too vast, the contrast too stark, the outcome I was hoping for too bleak. Assuming I could even achieve that outcome. The stakes I was playing for were at once so high, and also so dispiriting. I felt like a man whose alternative to death in the electric chair was life in prison. Life in solitary. Life without possibility of parole.
At three in the morning, I changed into the scrubs and lab coat and drove back to Jikei. It wasn’t much of a disguise, but in case someone saw me, at least it was something. There was an alley leading to a set of concrete stairs that themselves descended to the corridor to the morgue. The idea, I supposed, was to provide a discreet loading area for the delivery and removal of corpses, the sight of which might be troubling for visitors coming to offer well wishes to their convalescing relatives. The alley was dark and empty now, just some refuse containers and sagging cardboard boxes lining the brick walls. A single incandescent bulb hung from a corrugated awning over the stairs, casting deep shadows over the pipes and metal ducts on the walls all around. I backed the car in, cut the engine, eased the door shut, and waited, listening. Nothing. Just the quiet hum of the building’s air-conditioning.
At the bottom of the stairs, there were two rusted metal doors, each with a frosted glass insert, secured only by a trivial knob lock. I’d considered jamming the lock when I’d been here earlier in the day, but had rejected the idea as too likely to be noticed. Besides, I was confident I could handle it. If I was wrong, my backup plan was the emergency room entrance, but if possible I didn’t want to be seen at all. I crept down the stairs and glanced through the frosted glass. Nothing, just the vague, florescent-lit contours of the corridor. I pulled out the tube of lubricant I’d bought earlier, after seeing how rusty the hinges looked, and applied it now. The lock took me less than a minute to defeat and I made a mental note to thank the
nandemoya
in Shin Ōkubo, assuming of course I survived what I was planning. I opened the door a fraction, moved it back, opened it a fraction more, and so on, letting the lubricant work its way into the hinges. Finally, when I’d confirmed it was moving noiselessly, I moved inside.
The corridor looked exactly as it had earlier in the day—the boxes, the dust, the abandoned wheelchair—though if possible it felt even more still and silent. I crept up to the morgue door. It was wood with a frosted glass insert. I could see the light was off inside. Almost certainly no one was in there, but best to be careful. I pushed the door open, grimacing at the squeak, and said, “Shimura-san, are you in there?” In the unlikely event of an answer, I would apologize for my mistake and purport to go looking for “Shimura-san” elsewhere, and the intrusion would be disguised as something other than surreptitious. But unsurprisingly, there was no response. The room was empty.
I closed the door behind me and quickly oiled the hinges—no sense making any unnecessary noise on my way out. There was a decent amount of light spilling in through the glass from the corridor outside, and I had no trouble seeing. The walls to either side were lined with refrigerated drawers, three high, five across. On the far wall was a long metal cabinet, drawers closed, top covered with instruments. In the middle of the room was a large metal table with a drain in the center and a light fixture hanging over it—the spot where the pathologist would conduct exams. The air was heavy with antiseptic and bleach—not pleasant, but it beat what it must have been concealing.
I paused to game out how I would react if someone showed up while I was in here. This was a version of the when/then thinking that had been drilled into me in counter-ambush training, and I was pleased to see how, with sufficient motivation and practice, it applied also in more urban settings. I decided if I had time to hide, my best move would be to go under the metal cabinet. It had high legs, presumably to make it easier to get a mop under in case of spillage from the examination table. If there was no time for that, I’d say something about being overwhelmed and needing a quiet place to collect myself. Thin, but better than just standing there stammering.
I hit the refrigerated drawers methodically, starting top left and moving down right. Most of them were empty—maybe it had been a slow week for the hospital. One of them contained a startlingly voluptuous young woman, who I assumed from her unblemished condition was a drug overdose. Several were of ordinary-looking old people who I assumed had died naturally at the hospital. The next was of a bloody, mangled corpse—the yakuza who’d been crushed when the car crashed on Roppongi-dōri. I was getting warmer. The next was the prize I’d been looking for: the car’s driver, who I’d shot in the head. His height, weight, and build were similar to mine. That was good. And the point-blank shot from the Hi Power had rendered his face unrecognizable. That was better.