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.
I blew out a long breath and kept pacing. I hadn’t wanted to face it; that’s why I hadn’t thought it through. But my unconscious had been trying to tell me anyway. I’d been an idiot to try to ignore that feeling in my gut. Another thing I knew not to do in the jungle, and had to relearn in the city.
All right. Assume it was staged. How?
Well, let’s say…someone cued the mistress that I was coming and it was time for her to pull out. Maybe someone parked on the street, communicating with a radio. I couldn’t really know — there had been a number of parked cars, and I hadn’t checked them at all closely. Another lesson, I realized: I’d approached Fukumoto’s house oblivious to how I would defend the terrain if I were the one waiting for me. I’d done it differently to some degree at the New Otani just a little while earlier, and I wondered now whether that hadn’t been my unconscious, trying to signal me that I needed to sharpen up. Regardless, I hadn’t adequately placed myself in the enemy’s shoes in Fukumoto’s neighborhood, hadn’t examined myself through the eyes of potential opposition. I’d been lucky to live to enjoy that lesson, and I would make damn sure to apply it going forward.
All right, how wouldn’t be all that hard. But then who?
McGraw was the obvious answer. Who else could it be? He was the one who’d given me the file. I’d shown him I was impatient, hadn’t I? I’d wanted those yakuza files first. And he’d noticed the bag I was carrying, too, first at the Chinese restaurant where we’d met, and then at other places as well. He was sharp — he’d know the bag meant I was on the run, and therefore feeling pressed, and therefore eager to resolve this as quickly as I could. He’d know I would head to Fukumoto’s house as soon as I had the file with the location.