Which was?
Manipulate you into clipping Ozawa and Fukumoto Senior. After which, the one who gets clipped is you.
But if that was the case, why not do me himself? We’d met just the day before, at Inokashira. He knew I was coming. For that matter, he knew I was going to be at the New Otani just an hour ago. Neither would have been that hard.
Maybe he was going to at Inokashira, and then he’d changed his mind because he thought you’d be more useful alive, like you said. Or, more likely, he just doesn’t want to do it himself. That’s not his style. He manipulates other people into getting their hands dirty on his behalf. He doesn’t take those kinds of risks himself.
Not unless he absolutely has to, anyway.
One thing was clear. I had to up my game. I’d been looking at the world as though down deep it was no more than what its surface indicated. But there were levels I hadn’t sensed, connections I hadn’t considered. There was a world beneath the world — the real world. And I needed to start living in it, or I was going to die there.
All right. What’s your next move?
My next move was that every time McGraw wanted to meet me, or otherwise did something that could fix me in time and place, I had to assume it was an ambush, and adopt appropriate countermeasures. I’d been hellishly lucky he hadn’t dropped me already. What was that Churchill saying? “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” That’s what this felt like. Now the trick was to stop making myself an easy target.
I asked myself if I wasn’t being paranoid. In the last several days, I’d killed six people. What I was feeling now…could it be just the product of a stunted conscience, disturbed in its slumber?
All right, look at it this way: any downside to approaching McGraw as if your concerns are legitimate?
I couldn’t think of any.
And any downside to approaching McGraw as though he’s been telling you nothing but the truth?
Hmm. Just an ambush and my own violent death, I supposed.
Good. Not such a hard decision, then.
If I was right, McGraw was going to make some kind of move soon. I’d done what he wanted. From here on out, all I would represent to him was a liability. How had he put it at Taihō, the night I’d first proposed — or he’d manipulated me into proposing — that I kill Fukumoto Senior and his Mad Dog son? This is a business relationship. You provide some benefit, and you represent a cost. Well, the benefit was done; now would be the time for cost-cutting. I’d have to be careful as hell, but I realized that for the moment I had an advantage: he thought I was dumb. And maybe I had been, but I was getting smarter now. I’d seen something and he didn’t know I’d seen it.
You know, the thing about ambushes is, they can work both ways.
That was true. McGraw could propose a meeting, think he was laying a trap…and I could walk up behind him and blow his face off through the back of his head. I didn’t need a rock for this one. I had that yakuza’s Hi Power.
The problem was, I wasn’t sure. Was I sure enough to completely revise my view of what was going on, and take appropriate security measures? Hell yes. But was I sure enough to drop my CIA case officer without even knowing what he’d been up to or what he’d mixed me up in?
No. I wasn’t. That one sounded like out of the frying pan, into the fire. If the frying pan got unbearable, I’d jump wherever I had to. But I wasn’t there yet. I needed to keep cool. Be smart. And remain patient. McGraw was going to make a move. I could feel it. I just didn’t know what it was going to be. But I would soon enough.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
As it happened, I didn’t have to wait long for my break.
I’d pulled back from scouting the locations where I was supposed to have a shot at nailing Mad Dog. Too much risk the person getting nailed would be me. I checked in with my answering service regularly, but no word from McGraw. I had time on my hands and would start to get antsy, then remind myself the smart play was just to wait.
I was spending every morning and day with Sayaka. The only times we were apart were when she had to go to class or work. In bed, it seemed like every time was better than the one before it. I didn’t know why, exactly. Probably because we were getting more comfortable with each other. But also, I thought, because we were getting more comfortable with ourselves. I loved how unselfconscious she was. She still didn’t like my seeing her legs, but even that, I felt, was going to fade over time, and on everything else she was amazingly unaffected. She wanted to try everything — sex was like a giant experiment for her, a limitless, undiscovered country, and her lack of inhibition in bed was a giant turn-on for me. A few times she would do something and then catch herself, as though realizing maybe she was going too far, and then she would see how much I loved it and she would just plunge ahead. I realized I’d gone into this thing unconsciously assuming I’d be teaching and guiding her. Well, whatever I had to teach, she’d learned it in about a day. Since then, she’d been teaching me. Occasionally, I’d catch a flash of the toughness, the guardedness she’d displayed when I’d first met her and on the subsequent nights I’d come to see her at the hotel, but those moments only served to remind me of how much she was trusting me, how far she was letting me in, and moved me tremendously. Sometimes I’d worry I sounded sappy, and think maybe I should be a little more self-censored, but whatever I said or did, she always seemed to respond in kind. It was overwhelming, certainly more than I’d been expecting and more than I could really grasp. Underneath it all, I still felt guilty for what I knew in my heart was a horrible deceit. But I couldn’t tell her, and I also couldn’t stop what was happening between us. Once I had sorted out McGraw and everything else, maybe Sayaka and I would talk about where all this was going and what it meant. But there was no rush on that. As long as we kept getting those precious morning hours in her bed, I didn’t want to think about the future, and I don’t think Sayaka cared.
On the fourth of these wonderful mornings, while Sayaka was in class, I got the message I’d been waiting for. McGraw. I called him.
“You making any progress on that problem you were trying to solve?” he said.
“No,” I said, my heart beating hard. “No luck so far.”
He grunted. “You didn’t seem to need luck before. You sure you’re really trying?”
Son of a bitch, I thought. You have people watching and waiting — at some of the nexuses, maybe all of them. And they’ve been reporting to you that I’m nowhere to be seen.
“Are you crazy? Why wouldn’t I be trying?”
“Forget it, I’m just being disagreeable. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I think we just caught that break we were hoping for.”
Oh, we is it, now?
“Tell me.”
“You might have seen on the news…a certain someone was laid to rest yesterday in Yanaka Cemetery.”
I had seen it, in fact. Fukumoto’s funeral had practically been a state affair. I hadn’t even considered trying to get close to Mad Dog there. I doubted there was a gangster in Japan not in attendance.
“Yeah?”
“There was a lot of pomp and circumstance. Not exactly an intimate gathering. I have it on reliable authority someone close to the deceased will be paying his private respects tomorrow afternoon.”
“What time?” I wanted to sound eager. And in fact, I was. Just not for what McGraw was thinking.