But…why?
Had he wanted me to walk into Fukumoto’s house to be ambushed? But that didn’t make sense. If they’d had a spotter outside alerting the mistress, they could as easily have alerted the yakuza security inside. They could have been waiting on the far side of the garage and gunned me down the instant the door closed. They wouldn’t even have gotten my blood on Fukumoto’s nice carpeting. Instead, I was the one who had surprised them.
It felt like someone had greased the skids for me. Whoever it was had wanted Fukumoto dead. But that didn’t make sense. I was the one who wanted Fukumoto dead. I’d proposed the hit to McGraw as a solution to my problem with the yakuza. It was my idea, not his. There had been the thing in Ueno with the chinpira, which had been a total coincidence, and then…
I shook my head. It was crazy. Once I started questioning one thing, it called into question everything.
Then maybe you’re just being paranoid. A few coincidences, that’s all it was. It happens.
No. That felt like denial to me, like a narcotic. Of course I didn’t want to question everything — it was too much effort, too disorienting, too frightening. But dying would be worse, wouldn’t it? It wasn’t a question of how it all made me feel. I had to set that aside. What mattered was the truth.
All right. What do you know? Not what you think you know, but what you know for sure. Start with that.
Really just one thing: that McGraw had wanted Ozawa dead. That file had been pretty complete, and it had gotten me to the house and then to the sentō. And McGraw had proposed the whole thing as a quid pro quo for helping me out with Fukumoto. I looked at it from every angle I could imagine, and I couldn’t find a way around it: the one fact I had so far was that McGraw wanted Ozawa dead.
But someone had wanted Fukumoto dead, too. Someone who’d made sure I was able to get inside his house. Who else could it have been but McGraw? But if he had wanted Fukumoto dead, what was it, just a crazy coincidence that I had proposed it to him?
No. Coincidences like that don’t happen.
I paced among the markers, frustrated, sweat trickling down my back. I could sense the shape, the contours, but I couldn’t see the details.
Okay, how about this. McGraw knew where you’d be meeting Miyamoto to hand off the cash that morning in Ueno. He sent those chinpira to provoke you. How many times has he told you he knows about your temper? He knew you’d do what you did, that you’d have a problem with the yakuza as a result, that you’d propose killing them as a solution. He’d let you think it was your idea, but that would be just a manipulation.
It didn’t feel quite right. Almost, but not quite. Knowing I would kill one of the chinpira…it was just too uncertain. McGraw was good, I’d seen that, but he wasn’t psychic. It had to be something else.
All right, what if they had just robbed you? What if the plan had been to get to you before the exchange, beat you up, take the bag, and run? You’d be fifty grand in hock to the CIA. You’d be desperate, trying to get McGraw to believe you hadn’t just stolen the money yourself. At which point, he would have proposed a way for you to pay off your debt: kill these people for me.
Jesus. What happened instead…he’d just been improvising. Things hadn’t turned out the way he’d been expecting, so he adapted, created a plan B, achieved the same result.
But what about Pig Eyes, at the Kodokan? He was trying to kill you, no question. If he’d succeeded, how would you have carried out McGraw’s hits?
I kept pacing, examining the pieces from different angles, weighing them, rearranging them, seeing which I could get to cohere.
Pig Eyes…that would have been part of the original fuck-up. I wasn’t supposed to kill anyone in Ueno; it was supposed to be an easy ambush and robbery. But I did kill someone. And then Mad Dog, who doesn’t know McGraw’s full plans or whose pride is so wounded he doesn’t care, gets his crew and tracks me down on his own. McGraw doesn’t know about it…doesn’t even want it, because it would mess up his plans. Yes, that’s why he had looked surprised when I’d first told him about what happened at the Kodokan. The thing about the yakuza putting a contract out on me had been bullshit, intended to manipulate me, and then I responded, “Yeah, I know, they just tried to kill me.” It had thrown him, albeit only for a moment. And then he was back on his game. Christ, he was good.
All right, but what about the Fukumoto file? It wasn’t very complete. If McGraw had really wanted Fukumoto dead, why didn’t he give me an actionable file, like the one he gave me for Ozawa?
Because from McGraw’s perspective, Fukumoto was supposed to be random. Not something he’d been preparing for. If he’d handed you a detailed, actionable file, you might have been suspicious. All he needed was to get you to the house, and the girl would get you inside. You followed those cues like a pigeon pecking a lever.
Why, though? What was McGraw up to? What was the game? I didn’t know. But whatever it was, it involved taking out Ozawa, the head of the LDP Executive Council; Fukumoto, the head of the Gokumatsu-gumi, Tokyo’s biggest yakuza family; and Fukumoto’s son Mad Dog, presumably the father’s heir.
I paused. Why was I assuming McGraw wanted Mad Dog dead? If Mad Dog were in fact the heir, might it not be the case that killing the father was intended to pave the way for the son?
But then why manipulate me into proposing to kill Mad Dog, too?
Remember, he was improvising. Maybe that wasn’t part of the original plan. McGraw was controlling the order of the files he gave you, remember? First Ozawa. Then Fukumoto Senior. Then Fukumoto Junior. He was saving Junior for last because unlike the first two, he doesn’t want Mad Dog killed at all. Remember, at Inokashira he tried to talk you out of going after the son.
I still didn’t quite see it. Because, in the end, McGraw did get me the file. I’d just retrieved and memorized it the day before. Was it filled with bullshit? A wild goose chase, intended just to placate and distract me?
Or maybe it’s intended to fix you in time and place. Then they can easily clip the guy who did Ozawa and Fukumoto. No loose ends.
But the problem with Mad Dog’s file was that it wasn’t specific enough. The same generality, the same surfeit of nexuses that would prevent me from fixing Mad Dog would prevent anyone from properly fixing me. Plus, if the idea was to get me to go after Mad Dog so I would fix myself in time and place for an ambush, why had McGraw tried to talk me out of going after Mad Dog entirely?
I chewed that one over. I decided it was just as McGraw said: he’d been looking at me as nothing more than a bagman, a useful idiot, someone expendable. That is: manipulate me into taking out Ozawa and Fukumoto Senior. If there’s a problem, I take a fall; if it goes smoothly, McGraw takes me out. In the first instance, he denies the connection; in the second, he severs it. And then he had second thoughts. Why? Because I’d done better than he’d been expecting. Much better. He’d realized maybe I could be more useful to him and his program, whatever it was, alive than dead. And when I’d resisted, he’d decided, Okay, so be it, we’ll stick with plan A.