John Rain 08: Graveyard of Memories (26 page)

She laughed a little at that. There was an awkward pause.

I ran my fingers through my hair. “Last night—”

“I know.”

I felt myself flush. “You don’t even know what I was going to say!” Actually, neither did I.

She laughed. “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“I was just going to say…it was amazing. I kept thinking about it today.” It sure as hell beat everything else I was thinking about, but I kept that part to myself.

She smiled. “Yeah, me too. I couldn’t wait for tonight. Well, for tomorrow morning. When I get off here.”

“Sure you can’t slip away for a special, really loyal customer?”

“This place? Even if I could, and I can’t, no. This is just to pay the bills. I don’t want to have any other associations with it.”

“All right, I guess I can wait. Can I kiss you goodnight?”

She looked around nervously. “Okay, but make it quick—I really don’t need some drunken salaryman seeing us making out and getting the idea that’s what I’m here for.”

She unlocked the door and I ducked inside. I really just meant to give her a simple goodnight kiss, but it pretty instantly turned into more than that. She broke it off, breathing hard. “Get out of here, you. You’re too tempting.”

“Oh man, so are you.”

I went back around. “I have to charge you,” she said. “They know when a room’s been used because of the maid service. Otherwise, I wouldn’t.”

“Don’t worry about it. I don’t want to get you in trouble.” I gave her the money and took the key. “What time should I come down?”

“I get off at seven. But don’t meet me here. I don’t want people to see us together. Just come to my apartment, anytime after seven-thirty. Okay?”

“I can’t wait.”

She smiled. “Neither can I.”

chapter
twenty-six

I
spent the following morning at Sayaka’s. It was amazing—as good as the first time, and maybe even better, because now the ice was broken and we were getting a little more used to each other.

Several hours in, she was lying on her back, drifting in and out of sleep. I was turned on my side, my head propped on my fist, watching her. I didn’t want to get too comfortable—it would have felt great to nod off, but I had to meet Miyamoto at noon. And retrieve the money beforehand. I didn’t want it exposed for longer than necessary.

She glanced at me, her lids heavy. “What?”

“What, what?”

“Why are you looking at me?”

“I like looking at you.”

She smiled and touched my cheek. “You’re sweet.”

I kissed her fingers. “You really think so?”

“Yeah. Really.”

“Some people think I have a temper.”

“Not with me.”

I kissed her softly on the lips. “I like how I am with you.”

She didn’t say anything. She just smiled, tracing my ear, my jaw, my lips.

I glanced at the clock by the bed. “I have to go.”

“Work?”

“Yeah.”

“Still don’t want to tell me?”

“I can’t.”

“Jun, you’re not married, are you? I mean, you said you’d only been with one girl, but…”

The question caught me so off guard it made me laugh. But of course I could instantly see why she’d be concerned. “No.”

“I didn’t think so, but then…I wondered. It’s weird knowing so little about you.”

“I told you. You know me better than most.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.”

“It feels like that. But then I feel like…maybe I’m being naïve.”

I stroked her cheek. “You’re not naïve.”

“I’ve never thought so, anyway.”

“You’re not. Let me just get out of this jam—a work jam, it’s not marriage or a relationship or anything like that. And then we’ll see, okay?”

I looked at her for a long moment. I guess my expression must have been kind of dopey. She said, “What?”

I smiled. “I just feel lucky.”

There was a pause. She said, “Do you want to stay here tonight? You can if you want.”

“I kind of like seeing you at the hotel. I think I’d miss you if you weren’t here.”

She laughed. “You really are sweet. Okay, then, see you tonight?”

I kissed her. “See you tonight.”

I rode Thanatos to Ginza. On the way, that phrase,
I feel lucky
, kept echoing in my mind. It was bugging me, and I didn’t know why. I pushed it aside. There was one small thing I needed to take care of, and then I’d retrieve the money. I had to focus.

I found a guy delivering bento lunches on a motor scooter—an ordinary guy, doubtless unimaginative but responsible, and also doubtless in need of cash given the likely wages of the bento delivery industry. I asked him if he’d like to make a quick ten thousand yen. All he had to do was open a bank account for me, Taro Yamada, the Japanese equivalent of John Smith, right here at the local branch of the Taiyō Bank. I’d give him the cash, he’d sign the paperwork, ten thousand yen for fifteen minutes’ labor. He didn’t hesitate. It was done and he was back on his scooter before those bento lunches even had a chance to cool. Next, I called a telephone answering service and established an account for someone named John Smith, setting up payment through the new bank account.

The necessary infrastructure established, I rode Thanatos to Aoyama-itchōme and got on the Ginza line from there. I pulled on my little disguise as the train left the station, and when I got out at Gaienmae, I saw no one lingering after the train had departed. I picked up the envelope as I had last time, and taped my alter ego’s new phone number to the bottom of the seat. Now if Miyamoto needed to reach the contract killer I’d put him in touch with, he could. Ten minutes later, I was back on Thanatos, with ten thousand dollars in a bag around my shoulder. Not bad.

I headed over to Akasaka-mitsuke, parked near the New Otani, and walked the rest of the way. Miyamoto wasn’t there yet. Rather than wait for him in the lobby, I strolled around the hotel, imagining how I would get to me if I were the opposition. It was a good game and I knew I needed to practice, to get as fluent in the city as I had become in the jungle.

I knew that in McGraw’s imagination, or at least in his hopes, my meetings with Miyamoto were always super cloak-and-dagger. And initially they had been, at least to some extent. But over time, it had become increasingly relaxed. So I wasn’t at all perturbed when Miyamoto came in and waved as soon he saw me.

He came over and bowed low. “Thank you again for the great service you have done me.”

Of course, I played dumb. “What do you mean?”

“The…friend you introduced me to. He proved most helpful. Professional and discreet.”

“Really? He didn’t say anything to me. Well, discreet, as you say. But I’m glad it worked out. Your people were…pleased?”

“Very pleased. It seems I’m now worthy of a whole new level of respect, and I owe it all to you. It has been my good fortune to know you.”

Good fortune…luck again. Why was that notion bothering me? Again, I pushed it aside. “You don’t owe me anything,” I said. “I just hope you don’t get a promotion out of this—I’d miss our meetings.”

He laughed. “Do you have a little time? The hotel’s garden is wonderful—over four hundred years old. A beautiful sight to contemplate while drinking tea.”

So we spent an hour or so enjoying tea in the lounge overlooking the garden. Miyamoto commented on my new apparent mindfulness in the way I sipped and savored, saying he was honored I had listened to his silliness. I told him it was my honor that he would so patiently instruct someone so unworthy. It was easy to switch bags naturally when we stood to go. As I headed toward the back exit, Miyamoto said, “I won’t forget what you did for me, or that I owe you a service in return.”

“Really, you are much too kind. All I did was offer an introduction.”

“And you are much too modest. I am in your debt.”

“Okay, you can pay for the tea again next time.”

He laughed. “That will hardly suffice. But yes. Until we meet again.”

A number of things had been roiling my mind, including that weirdly disturbing notion of luck and fortune, and though I’d suppressed it all while chatting with Miyamoto, I wanted to think carefully about what was bothering me now. So I rode Thanatos the short distance to Zenpuku-ji, a small temple constructed in 824, making it Tokyo’s oldest after Sensō
-
ji in Asakusa. Zenpuku-ji was a quiet space with a giant ginkgo tree said to be as old as the temple itself, with both the tree and the temple surrounded by graves, many of them ancient. It would be a good place to work things through. In my experience, nothing fosters more sober, careful thought, more honest reflection, than finding oneself the sole living trespasser in a sanctum of the dead.

I parked, walked up the stone path, and began pacing among the trees and ancient markers. It was cooler in the cemetery, the leaves providing some shade and the lack of asphalt offering less material to radiate the sun’s heat. It was quiet, too, the surrounding neighborhood genteel and the traffic distant. A little ways off stood a monk, head shaven, robes black, chanting and lighting incense before one of the graves. The breeze carried the smoke to where I walked, and the pungent smell brought me back to my childhood in this city, as it always did, as I suspected it always would. I thought of my father, buried in another Tokyo cemetery not far from here, the memory of whom was becoming increasingly remote for me, detached, improbable. I would think of him, and wonder whether I was remembering the man, or instead remembering mere memories, my recollections themselves simulacra. And of my mother, a much fresher wound, interred in a faraway continent as her grief-stricken parents had pleaded and as I, reluctantly, had acceded, believing—perhaps foolishly—that our first duty is to the living and that the dead, infinitely patient, will always understand.

One thing that was on my mind was Sayaka, wondering if I was married. It was almost funny on one level, but on another it made me feel deeply uneasy. Because there were things about me I knew I could never tell her, things she would never understand or accept, things I would never want her to know regardless. Things I had done not only in war, but in this very city, just days earlier…some of them on the very afternoon of the night we’d first made love.

But you told her there were things you couldn’t talk about, right?

Yes, I had, and I had told myself that was a kind of honesty. But was it really? On the surface, yes, but one level deeper it seemed like the worst kind of lie—the kind shaped like the truth for the benefit of one person, and in order to more effectively deceive another.

I didn’t know what to do. Just run off with her? I had the ten thousand dollars from what I’d done for Miyamoto…would that be enough to get us established in America? And even if it were, what would I do then? I’d still be the same cast-aside former soldier with no education, no prospects, and no skills useful for anything I could ever explain to Sayaka or anyone else.

I shook my head. What would she think, if I told her I was contemplating running away with her? Would she even want that? She’d probably think I was a love-struck kid with a crush.

Or maybe she wouldn’t. I didn’t know. I felt like we’d already passed the point where it might have been possible to just slow things down or make them go backward. I hadn’t seen it coming and didn’t see it when it went by, either, but it felt like we were falling in love. Which meant Sayaka was falling in love with someone who, if she knew what he really was…I didn’t know what she’d think. I didn’t want to consider what that knowledge would do to her, after the way she had trusted me and opened up to me.

Maybe the best thing, the only thing, was to just finish the situation with the yakuza and then find a way out. Never tell her any of it, or anyone else, either. And as months became years and years became decades, the things I had done here this week, and in the war before that, would lose more and more of their potency and feel farther and farther away, until finally they would be just distant memories, like stars in a faraway galaxy whose light took millennia to reach earth, and even then could be seen only dimly, if at all. I could do that. I could keep it all separate. I’d been lucky so far, hadn’t I?

Luck again. Why was my good luck bothering me? I mean, if the timing hadn’t been so good outside Fukumoto’s house…

I stopped and thought about that. The timing had been good, hadn’t it? I mean, almost miraculously good. I thought getting in would be hard, but in the end, it had been easy.

On the one hand, of course, the whole thing hadn’t been easy at all. It had turned out there were four people in that room, two of them armed and who nearly got the drop on me. And the wife coming home just as I was leaving, that certainly didn’t feel like good luck. No, I suddenly realized, what had been rubbing me the wrong way was how perfectly
timed
my arrival felt. The very moment I showed up to recon the house was the very moment the mistress happened to be leaving it. The mistress, who was driving a convertible, who had an automatic garage door opener, who drove a short distance and then parked her car with the garage door opener accessible inside it.

And what about that interior garage door? The house was obviously designed, and presumably purchased, with security in mind. Leaving an interior door unlocked like that seemed awfully sloppy under the circumstances. And the wife…when she’d gone in, I’d heard her turn the key and then grunt under her breath, then turn the key again. Now I thought I understood what had happened: she expected the door to be locked, and thought she was unlocking it. She was perplexed when she realized she was mistaken. And why would she have been perplexed, unless that door was typically locked? And if it was typically locked, why had it been left unlocked at the exact moment of my arrival?

Yes, I’d been lucky in various ways since this whole thing had started. Ozawa in the
sentō
, and Mori outside his club…the recon required to get the timing of that sort of thing right could take days, even weeks. But still, most people are creatures of habit. Ozawa had to bathe more or less every evening, especially during Japan’s hot and humid summer. Mori liked to party at his club. Those felt like things that, one way or the other, were going to be mostly a matter of time, and it didn’t take all that much luck for the necessary time to be minimal. And even if those first two hadn’t gone as smoothly as they did, it was mostly just a question of waiting and assessing a little longer. It wouldn’t have been that hard. But Fukumoto…that timing had been
perfect
. If I hadn’t seen the mistress leaving the house right then, I had no idea when or how another opportunity would have presented itself.