Japantown (16 page)

“How long is
soon
?”

“About a week.”

Jenny wilted. “That’s too long.”

We went through a variation of this conversation before each trip. An answer of “two days” would have elicited the same response.

“Can’t you stay? It’s my summer vacation.”

Knowing she was spinning out excuses, I gave her a broad grin and dragged her into my lap so she sat behind the wheel, looking out at the same rain-slicked blacktop I navigated.

“You want to drive?” I asked.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“You’re too smart for me. I promise to make it as short as I can. And I’ll call.”

“And promise to be careful of China guys?”

“Promise.”

Then she unveiled a mind-bender that rivaled the email Hara slung my way about the same time.

—

Running late, I rushed back to the apartment, finished packing, uploaded Hara’s communiqué to my smartphone for later reading, and dashed out to SFO in the Cutlass. Abandoning the car in long-term parking, I boarded my JAL flight to Narita and settled in with a cup of green tea and airline rice crackers to read Hara’s notes on his family.

Sent on CompTel Nippon digital stationery with the motto
Ears and Eyes to the Future
splashed across the top, the dispatch was filled with nothing more than names, addresses, basic vitals, and a short list of American acquaintances, everything the SFPD already had from the passports and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department. Forty-plus
hours for a man who owns Japan’s largest communications network and I get name, rank, and a PR blip.

I recognized the Japanese stall when I saw it. The immediate question was why? The ways of Japan were rarely linear and the whys often went unexplained. When the Great Hanshin Earthquake devastated Kobe in 1995 and hundreds were trapped in the rubble, a Swiss rescue team arrived at the scene from Europe sooner than Japan’s own prime minister, who was an hour away by plane.

Why? Because career-minded public figures ducked for cover. In a country where good work is expected—but not praised—enemies pounce on any blunder, so pols and bureaucrats alike occupied themselves with minutiae surrounding the event. Inaction protected careers, my Japanese sources told me. If you didn’t
instigate
anything, you couldn’t be
blamed
for anything later.

So, on the heels of the quake, fires raged unchallenged. Pinned under rubble with the clock ticking, hundreds of Japanese died needlessly, and hundreds more lingered in makeshift aid centers watching their own vital signs weaken because medical supplies were locked up in red tape no bureaucrat was willing to stick his neck out to expedite. Doctors, volunteers, and key units of the Japan Self-Defense Forces sat on the sidelines, waiting in vain for deployment orders. With the phone lines down, I could only speculate about the well-being of Kiyoshi Tanaka, one of my elementary school buddies in Tokyo, who had married his high school sweetheart and taken a job in Kobe. Their only child, Shoji, was my godson.

Shoji and his mother died from a fire that overtook them fifteen hours after the quake, long after rescue workers could have pulled them from the wreckage, their neighbors told me, if the proper equipment had been deployed soon after the earthquake. Kiyoshi died waiting for a blood transfusion to be shipped from a nearby medical facility that was tied up in paperwork by the Ministry of Health and Welfare.

That was the classic Japanese stall on a grand scale. The world had seen it in various permutations before, saw it again with the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear disaster, and would see it in the future. As if that were not enough, life and death were secondary to the nation’s face, all the more so when the citizenry in question was considered second-class,
as the residents of Kobe were. The unspoken policy went like this: with the world watching, an unseemly rush to the scene suggested panic, immaturity, and weakness. It was also undignified, an even larger faux pas.

Turbulence jiggled my teacup in the hollow of the tray table. A glance outside showed a line of brooding storm clouds in the distance. Hara wasn’t hiding from the disaster that was Japantown, but as usual he was going his own way. I wondered why. I had no clue, but since I would see the communications magnate in Tokyo, I gave up trying to unravel his behavior for now and returned my attention to the knotty problem Jenny had unveiled as she helped me steer the Cutlass down the deserted streets of San Francisco toward Renna’s front door.

“This will keep you thinking about me,” she had said.

“I always think about you, Jen.”

“Well, now you’ll think about me
more
.”

“That’s not possible,” I said. “But what do you have for me?”

“A best-ever joke. What kind of bees give milk?”

“I don’t know. What kind?”

“No, this is a best-ever. You have to guess.”

“Okay, how about honeybees?”

“Wrong.”

“Digger bees?”

“Nope.”

“Great big old South American milk-pail bees.”

“That’s silly. No.”

“Okay. What?”

She pouted. “No, no. It’s a best-ever, so you have to think about it until you guess the answer. And if you’re thinking about it, you’re thinking about me. See?”

—

I did see. And it hurt. My heart ached at such transparent need I couldn’t quench, and I promised myself I’d spend more time with her on my return.

When the plane shuddered again, the flight attendants suddenly suspended activity, hurriedly returned their serving trolleys to the galley,
and were strapping themselves in by the time the pilot made the requisite announcement of rough weather ahead.

If he only knew.

Wind chop plagued us all the way to Narita Airport. Even on firm ground, the turbulence continued unabated—they hit us twenty minutes after I pushed through the doors of Brodie Security.

CHAPTER 24

TOKYO, 5:15 P.M.

G
ET
in here, Brodie.”

A large, thick-fingered hand forged from ten generations of fishermen slapped me on the back as I arrived at Brodie Security. Shig Narazaki, my late father’s partner, was an early hire. Talented, shrewd, and fast on his feet, he became indispensible and was soon helping Jake expand the business. He’d also been the closest thing I’d had to an uncle when I lived here as a child.

“What happened to you?” Narazaki asked. “You’re as soggy as day-old rice.”

“George’s limo service.”

Narazaki grinned. “The Viper with the top off?”

“That’s the picture,” I said. “George figured he could outrun a summer shower.”

Joji “George” Suzuki, a longtime friend and car aficionado, had picked me up at the Narita airport in his latest acquisition—a 1992 Viper convertible, the inaugural year. Before leaving home, he’d removed the top to accommodate my luggage, exposing us to an unexpected downpour as we sped from the glittering rice fields of Chiba into the urban chaos that was Tokyo. Fifty minutes later, his sleek machine glided into the city’s sprawl of high and low, old and new. Wherever you looked, you saw tangled masses of narrow apartment blocks, needle-shaped office buildings, and kanji-spotted storefronts.

But that was Tokyo. You either loved it or hated it. The city’s architectural bouillabaisse fell somewhere between Singapore’s neat and proper and the junkman’s jamboree that was Hong Kong. Old wooden homes were overshadowed by towering apartment complexes alongside convenience stores in garish neon next to crumbling neighborhood ma-and-pa shops, maybe a tofu maker with gleaming steel vats in the kitchen and living quarters upstairs. But somehow the urban gumbo worked. Everything found a place and everyone knew where to go. The streets were clean, the people were courteous and purposeful, and the countless subway trains running underfoot were plentiful and on time.

Brodie Security plied its trade in a neglected byway of the fashionable Shibuya district in west-central Tokyo. Its offices were located four stories above a soba shop and a few doors down from a fourth-generation herbalist, whose wooden shack, a remnant of hard times after World War II, had begun to list southward. Inside, the business that Jake built was all activity. Twenty desks crammed into a forty-by-fifty-foot area, with private offices running along the back. A quick scan tallied fifteen bodies. I knew each of the full-time employees by name, as had my father. A long-haired Japanese youth I’d never met, either a freelancer or a new hire, had his head buried in the innards of one of our servers.

Jake’s old partner chuckled. “Count on George. But the Viper’s fast, no?”

“Very.”

“That’s the
big
picture. If I understood Noda’s grunts, we have a lot to hash out.”

“You understood.”

He stared at my feet. “You wouldn’t have to leak on our newly waxed floors if you berthed your boat with us.”

Narazaki continued to push me to take a permanent chair at the agency in Tokyo and run the antiques business from afar. One day he would relinquish the reins of the company, but he felt obliged to stay on as long as I remained an untested quantity. “When you tracked down the Rikyu piece, you faced the yakuza and lived,” he’d snipped, “but that was more about art and luck than anything else. Before you take
up Jake’s post, you need field training, otherwise you’ll be as useless as spent moxa.”

During my childhood, Narazaki had come for dinner twice a week, bringing gifts on the holidays. If my father were away on an assignment over the weekend, Uncle Shig would drop by and give me pointers on my karate and judo, sparring with me and then beaming with pleasure when I mastered a particularly complex move. The Brodies were his city family. In a common scenario for the extended family culture of Japan, he left for the big city while his own brood—a wife and three sons—stayed behind in the countryside, saddled with aging grandparents, rice paddies, and a fishing boat, run with a brother, and as they grew, the sons. Narazaki returned home four or five times a year for conjugal visits.

“It’s a hard life,” I said. “Maybe this will help.”

I tossed him a bottle of Johnnie Walker and his fisherman’s hands snatched it from the air with a quick sureness.

“Liquids from every pore, huh? Doesn’t buy you fish bait in these waters, but wet or dry, it’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to be back. Five minutes in my office after I dry off?”

“You got it.”

Once ensconced behind the closed door of my father’s old post, I drew the blinds, dipped into my suitcase, and slipped on a fresh shirt and jeans. Then I took a seat behind Jake’s onetime desk.

I kept my workspace at Brodie Security pretty much the way my father had left it: same wooden desk, same bookshelves, and same paraphernalia. There was an old Japanese army short sword Jake had confiscated during his days as an MP, a three-hundred-year-old ceramic saké carafe presented to him when he opened Brodie Security, and a first-place trophy for marksmanship from his LAPD days, a talent the gene genie had graciously passed on to me and I’d polished on a shooting range in Los Angeles with my South Korean neighbor and his son.

To the bric-a-brac I’d added a photograph of Jenny and a certificate for Honorable Service in the Recovery of an Invaluable National Asset awarded by the Agency of Cultural Affairs for my role in unearthing the long-lost Rikyu masterpiece.

As a courtesy I placed a call to Hara’s office to let him know I was in town, but caught him in a meeting, so I left a message with his secretary. A minute later Narazaki knocked, entered and, after shutting the door firmly behind him, he slapped me on the back again as I struggled to my feet.

“Damn good to see you, boy. You hooked your first big one. He check you out?”

Recalling the bodyguard’s attack, I nodded solemnly. “That he did.”

A wide grin split Narazaki’s face. “The monster catches always do.” Then the grin vanished and he grew serious. “You snagged this one yourself, but why don’t you hand it off and let us reel her in?”

“Can’t do that. I’m consulting for the SFPD.”

Narazaki scratched the back of his head. “You could step away from the investigative work and just report our results.”

“Not this time. Besides, you’re the one who’s always on me to get more involved in Brodie Security. This seems a good place to start.”

Narazaki frowned. “I was thinking something smaller.”

I shrugged. “Hara came to me.”

He looked skeptical, then acquiesced. “True. If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“All right, then I’ll just have to give you plenty of backup. I’ve put Noda on point. He’s the best we got. You work with him, you’ll learn fast. Just keep your head down.”

“Not a problem.”

“And I want George to handle support duties. He’s itching to do more than keep the books. That work for you?”

Last October, I’d suggested George take a part-time position at the firm. We needed new blood and George needed to step away from the family-owned multinational without straying too far from home. Both of us had been born in Tokyo in the same year to fathers who were best friends, their rapport one of those rare and fully ripened blends of East and West. After sharing some good childhood memories, we’d floundered in the rough waters of my parents’ divorce before George came through in a pinch when I needed him, and our friendship was reawakened.

“Sounds good.”

“Then it’s settled. Noda leads and you’ll assist, with George as non-critical support. Noda was a great friend of your father’s. He’ll show you the ropes in, ah, his own way.”

Reopening the door, Narazaki called for Noda and George, and seconds later they drifted into the room. The chief detective dropped his bulldog frame into a chair with a thud, nodding in my direction. George settled in with genteel grace, crossing his legs. The slash cleaving Noda’s eyebrow was prominent. The office grapevine had it that the pimp who attacked him never got a second chance with the knife. Noda relieved him of the weapon, then left a few scars of his own.

Narazaki said happily, “Japantown is the biggest case of the year. Rich, famous, plenty of headlines.”