Japantown (25 page)

“Why?”

“It’s too close to home.”

“Theirs?”

“No, their clients’. Big difference.”

Noda tossed the idea around while he consumed another mouthful of noodles. “Possible,” he said when he finished eating.

I fed him my theory: In the darkened halls of the ryokan, the innkeeper had told us the Ogi clan’s genius lay in serving the ruling powers of the day. According to Takahashi’s interpretation, the kanji suggested Soga eliminated kings. And as history showed us, kings fought kings. Or in Japan, warlords. Shoguns and daimyos. And would-be shoguns. Then, as now, the powers-that-be camped in the capital of Edo, now Tokyo, the center of government and big business. Tokyo was a safe haven
because
Soga’s major clients resided in the capital, now and in centuries past. With a quarter of Japan’s population living in the greater Tokyo area, Soga couldn’t litter the place with bodies. So, to reassure their clientele and protect the longevity of their enterprise, the “king-breakers” designated Japan’s capital city off-limits. It was simply good business sense. I topped off my recital with a plum—I believed Soga’s working base was elsewhere because the village was too isolated and the faces of the recruits too young.

Noda filled the several minutes he needed to mull over my ideas by polishing off the rest of his meal, then adding
soba-yu
—steaming hot cooking water that contained nutrients from the buckwheat in the noodles—to his remaining dipping sauce to make a soup. He sipped the soup and nodded in approval, a gesture I’d seen him give my father back in the days when I sometimes hung out at Brodie Security. “Makes sense.”

“You think so?”

“Ties everything up. No holes.”

“Which makes what Toru and Mari are working on more important than ever. If they can trace the hacker, we could locate their base.”

“You’re saying we wait on the blip?”

“Yeah. Unless you have a better idea?”

“Don’t, but—”

“What?”

“We crossed a line in Soga. So until then, be careful.”

Meaning maybe they wouldn’t
kill
us in Tokyo, but there were plenty of other things they could do.

—

I strolled out into the summer swelter. After the coolness of the soba shop, the steamy heat hammered my temples while the glare bouncing off the sidewalk sent a stabbing pain to a tender place at the back of my eyes. I was heading for the side entrance of our building when a black limousine edged up to the curb.

A pair of six-foot-two neckless bulwarks with shoulders like stone ramparts stepped briskly from the lengthy vehicle and took up positions on either end.

“You Brodie?” one of them asked.

My pulse quickened. With our building behind me, I was boxed in.

I said, “Yeah. Why?”

Stalling. Giving myself time. Giving Noda a chance to spot me. He’d hung back for a few words with Murata, who would be unhappy that I’d left his meticulously prepared fare untouched.

“Come with us, please.”

Please.
The rear guard reached out and flicked open a back door. My mind raced to make sense of the scene before me. The two men wore dark suits and dark turtlenecks. There was some sense of agility to these hulks—maybe they’d dabbled in a martial art or two—but impressions of dark alleys and midnight thrashings were more prominent than late-night acrobatics in black.

Private bulwarks?

My throat tightened. Even if they were only hired security, an unannounced excursion in an anonymous car could still be unpleasant. In Japan, there were always unseen powers in the shadows.

I examined the limo. It had tinted windows and a miniature Japanese flag anchored to the far corner of the front hood. There was stateliness there. I glanced at the suited bulldogs and saw the same lofty pride. My apprehension gave way to expectancy. Their owner’s identity remained cloaked but his status was loudly trumpeted.

Someone was reaching out.

Inside the restaurant I saw movement. Noda was up and about.

I put some distance between myself and the soba shop, then stepped toward the automobile. Noda came out a few seconds later, saw the lay, and without a word headed in the opposite direction.

As I slid into the car, I cast a discreet glance back. Palming his cell phone, Noda was punching buttons.

The way I saw it, maybe it was time to take a calculated risk.

CHAPTER 41

H
E
was a hundred ten pounds of brittle bone and sagging yellow flesh bundled up in an Italian suit and a chrome-plated wheelchair that seemed to swallow him whole. His hands lay like dead fish under a scarlet lap cloth.

Fifteen minutes after my abduction, the limousine had rolled up to a redbrick neoclassical edifice built in the early 1900s and I was handed over to a more presentable pair of private bodies in blue suits, silk ties, and cologne. The second guard ushered me into a gloomy, high-vaulted room lathered in textured wallpaper, plush carpeting, and floor-to-ceiling velvet drapery—all in scarlet. Overhead, a silver chandelier added the final touch. It was a concept of Old Russian or European elegance that Japan’s powermongers of generations past had embraced for their parlors.

“I hope you’ll excuse the dimness of the room,” my unknown host said. “Bright light hurts my eyes.”

Not knowing whom I was dealing with, I remained silent. All interior lighting had been extinguished in favor of a dim illumination courtesy of a north-facing window overlooking a shaded rock garden. I’d been in midnight power outages with more light.

“Please have a seat, Brodie-san.”

“Thank you, ah . . . forgive me, I don’t know your name.”

“All in good time.”

Though evasive replies were second nature for men of his make, the answer displeased me. It was cagey and heralded anything but a fruitful meeting. With reluctance, I dropped into a stuffed armchair across the
room, the only seat in the spacious parlor not on wheels. Between us lay an oversize coffee table chosen, no doubt, to maintain distance. Seeking a clearer view of the man before me, my eyes struggled to adjust to the daytime dimness.

“I apologize for the suddenness of my summons. Allow me to offer you some refreshment. Fresh juice? Coffee, beer, whiskey?”

Two female attendants hovered nearby, attentive to my answer. Their kimonos were silk and expensive, their manner solicitous but lacking the effortless grace of the highly trained.

“Nothing, thank you.”

Hearing my reply, the kimonoed servants bowed and retreated. The scented watchdogs settled by the exits at either end of the room. I wasn’t going anywhere without permission.

“I am told you are conversant in our ways,” the old man said. “Do you know the expression
No aru taka was tsume o kukusu?”

“ ‘The clever eagle hides its talons’? Sure.”

“Good. For that is what I wish to discuss.”

The phrase embodied a way of life for many Japanese: Never show your real power. A faceless form in the shadows is a position of strength. It is how Japan deals not only with its own but the world at large. The pose has the additional benefit of being hard to attack. Targets are tough to zero in on if they can’t be pinned down. The most influential men in recent Japanese history were the hidden kingmakers who shied away from the limelight. These powerbrokers were sometimes called
kuroko,
after the nearly invisible Kabuki stagehands dressed in full-body black who assist the actors during onstage costume changes in full view of the audience. These behind-the-scenes movers were also known as shadow shoguns. Most Japanese know that shadow shoguns exist, but few know who they are. Before me sat one such phantom.

“Do I leave you speechless, Brodie-san? Come, come. I’ve heard so much about you.”

Alluding to one’s own strength broke the cardinal rule, so his reference involved a different power center.

I cast the only line at hand. “Japantown?”

He nodded encouragingly, a bony hand flicking once beneath the scarlet lap cover.

“The kanji?”

I watched him as I said it. He evinced no surprise, no puzzlement, no curiosity.
He knew.
Back in San Francisco, no one outside of the SFPD task force and a few select insiders were aware of the calligraphy’s existence. In Japan, only a handful of highly placed sources within the government had been informed of the kanji. Which told me just how influential the wheelchair-bound man before me was.

My host said, “And should the eagle choose to show interest?”

“It might display its claws. The sight of talons is often enough.”

The skin around his eyes crinkled. “I am pleased you understand the distinction.”

I digested the distinction. He was offering one of several possible interpretations for the Nakamura killings. I chose the most likely one: “Japantown was a message?”

“An able comment.”

“Meant to strike fear?”

“A penetrating remark.”

I threw him a curve. “If these are men who do not willingly reveal themselves, they must have extracted a heavy price to leave a signature of their work.”

“Your understanding gains in breadth. And?”

Eagle . . . kanji . . . message . . .
“This is intimidation at the highest level, so only those in top positions would know the kanji’s meaning and fear it.”

My host brought gnarled hands from under the scarlet lap spread and placed them on the padded armrests of his chair. Patient. Attentive. Expectant.

I gazed up at the unlit chandelier.
The murders . . . a message . . . Hara’s foot dragging . . . son of a bitch!
Was I deaf, dumb, and stupid? It was as obvious as batter on shrimp tempura: Brodie Security was fish bait.

The attack
was
directed against the maverick businessman, who in turn deflected the assault, setting us up to draw Soga into the open.

No wonder Hara was avoiding my calls. No wonder his secretary told me to keep on doing what I was doing. Having taken the offensive and set me in motion, her boss had ducked for cover. He was leveraging
Brodie Security’s manpower and my connection to the SFPD to force Soga into the open. He lured us into Soga’s sights by jetting over to see me then directing his famous daughter to visit my shop while the Japanese paparazzi, predictably, did what they always did: recorded her every tear and flourish. An unwitting pawn in her father’s plans, Lizza had even
posed
in front of the shop. “
No one ever really knows what Father thinks
,” she’d told me in confidence. How right she was. I flushed with anger at Hara’s betrayal, only to cringe a moment later at my gullibility.

Hara had orchestrated the setup to end all setups.

A noose into which I’d obligingly slipped my neck.

CHAPTER 42

H
ATE
welled up from a dark region low in my gut. It was not a pleasant feeling. Across the room, my host’s eyes glittered with unmasked glee. He was feeding on my loathing with the relish of a rodent rooting through entrails.

Barely containing my repugnance for both men, I hissed at the powerbroker through clenched teeth. “We’re pigeons for the eagle, then?”

His Gray Eminence presented a stoic front as ageless and impervious as the stone ramparts of Osaka Castle. Except for his eyes. They were enlivened with a gleam of amusement. My consternation was proving to be first-rate entertainment.

A half-smile flitted across his lips. “Have you been followed?”

“Yes.”

“Since when?”

“San Francisco.”

“They are monitoring your movements. If they feel you are a serious concern, they will strike. You, Brodie Security, even your family, if necessary.”

Jenny.

“That’s a lot of people,” I said.

“Numbers present no obstacle to them, as you’ve seen.”

Quite clearly, the man knew everything about Japantown. “But the Nakamura family was defenseless. We’re not.”

“Hara expects the pigeon to find claws. Out of necessity.”

“What are the chances of them considering us a ‘serious concern’?”

His lips parted in silent mirth. Three brackish stumps studded gray-black
gums. His rotting dark hole of a mouth sent waves of revulsion through me that I managed to hide only with great effort.

“Have no worry on that account. Hara has been very thorough and”—knowing what was coming, I felt my stomach convulse—“if he hadn’t been, I would have.”

In the village, I’d been attacked with knives, shot at, and poisoned. Now, in a gilded parlor, a man of power and privilege tells me—without pretense—that he would have gladly set me up if my client hadn’t already done so. It took me a long moment before I found my voice again. “I’ll take that drink now. Whiskey, straight up.”

My host raised a finger and a watchdog moved to the side bar.

In a distant part of the building, a clock chimed seven times. As I waited for the liquor, the old man’s bony hands slithered from the armrests back under the protective covering of the red lap cloth, and he was once more as motionless as the lichen-encrusted stones in his garden.

The decadence of this ancient salon was wearing me down, as were the powerbroker’s riddles. I dreaded his next words but craved them too. In the meantime, the liquor provided a welcome warmth and numbed my misgivings.

“Personally,” the old man said, “I think someone miscalculated.”

I stared at my host and tormentor without expression. “How’s that?”

“They took everything from Hara. With no family remaining aside from his errant daughter, he’s fighting back.”

“So you also think it’s an attack on Hara?”

“Almost certainly. They want him alive but tamed.”

“Why?”

His tone turned glacial. “Who knows? But surely, if whoever hired Soga sought Hara’s money or business, Hara would be dead and they’d deal with the heirs.”

Closing my eyes, I let my head fall back against the chair. I’d had enough of the slime. “So why am I here?”

“I want to help.”

My eyes snapped open. “
You’re
offering to help
me
?”