Yukiko picked up an oshibori and used it to wipe Murakami’s hands, cool as an animal handler grooming a lion. Naomi handed me mine.
“Arai-san is a friend of mine,” Murakami said, looking at me and then at the girls and smiling his bridged smile. “Please be good to him.”
Yukiko smiled deeply into my eyes as if to say If we were alone, I would take suuuch good care of you. In my peripheral vision I saw Murakami catch the look and frown.
I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong end of this bastard’s jealousy, I thought, imagining Harry.
The waitress came and put the drinks on the table. Murakami drained his in a single draught. Yukiko followed suit.
“Ii yo,” Murakami growled. Good. Yukiko set her glass down with practiced delicacy. Murakami looked at her. She returned the look, something almost theatrically nonchalant in her expression. The look went on for a long moment. Then he grinned and grabbed her hand.
“Okawari,” he called to the waitress. Two more drinks. He pulled Yukiko to her feet and away from the table. I watched him lead her to a room to the side of one of the dance stages.
“What was that?” I asked Naomi in Japanese.
She was looking at me. Warily, I thought.
“A lap dance,” she said.
“They seem to know each other well.”
“Yes.”
I looked around. The adjacent tables were filled with parties of Japanese men in standard sarariman attire. Even with the ambient noise, they were too close to permit a private conversation.
I leaned closer to Naomi. “I didn’t expect to be back here,” I said softly.
She winced. “I’m glad you came.”
I didn’t know what to make of the inconsistency between her reaction and her words. “You must have a lot of questions,” I said.
She shook her head. “I just want to make sure you enjoy yourself tonight.”
“I think I know why you’re acting this way,” I started to say.
She cut me off with a suddenly raised hand. “How about that lap dance?” she asked. Her tone was inviting, but her eyes were somewhere between serious and angry.
I looked at her, trying to gauge what she was up to, then said, “Sure.”
We walked to the same room that Murakami and Yukiko had gone to a few minutes earlier. Another Nigerian was waiting just inside the entrance. He bowed and pulled aside a high-backed, semicircular sofa. A matching unit was positioned on the other side of it. We stepped inside and the Nigerian pushed the front half closed behind us. We were now enclosed in a circular, upholstered compartment.
Naomi gestured to the cushioned sofa seat. I lowered myself onto it, watching her face.
She stepped back, her eyes on mine. Her hands went to her back and I heard the sound of a zipper. Then her right hand moved to the left strap of her dress and began to ease it over the smooth skin of her shoulder.
There was a sudden buzz in my pocket.
Son of a bitch. Harry’s bug detector.
Continuous, intermittent, continuous. Meaning both audio and video.
I was careful not to look around or do anything else that might have seemed suspicious. I opened my mouth to say something to her, something any other excited beneficiary of an incipient lap dance might utter. But she made a face-half scowl, half exasperation-that stopped me. She raised a subtle index finger from the strap of her dress to the ceiling. Then she cocked her head slightly and shifted her finger to her ear.
I got the message. People were listening, and watching.
Not just here. At the table, too. That’s why her responses had been so odd. She couldn’t warn me there.
And why she had looked angry tonight, I realized. Was I just the American accountant I had claimed to be, or at least a neutral party? If so, silence would be her safest course. Was I involved with Murakami, who frightened her? If so, silence, and certainly a warning like the one she had just given me, would be dangerous. I had inadvertently forced her to choose.
But the detector hadn’t buzzed at the table. Then I realized: Murakami. If the tables were monitored, they knew to turn off the equipment when the boss was around. Those would be the rules, and I imagined that no one would want a guy like Murakami finding out that they weren’t being adhered to. And the last time I’d been here, the device hadn’t been charged yet. That’s why it hadn’t warned me then.
I reached into my pocket to switch off the unit, nodding to indicate I understood.
She finished moving the strap away and slipped her arm through it, then slowly performed the identical action on the opposite side. She crossed her arms. Her nostrils were flaring slightly with her breathing. She paused for a moment. Then, still scowling, her body rigid, she moved her arms to her sides. The dress slid down, past her breasts, past her belly, gathering in black ripples at her waist.
“You can touch with your hands,” she said. “Only above the waist.”
I stood, keeping my eyes on hers. I leaned forward and put my mouth to her ear. “Thanks for the warning,” I whispered.
“Don’t thank me,” she whispered back. “It’s not as though you left me any choice.”
“I’m not with these people.”
“No? You were fighting tonight, weren’t you?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Your face is scratched. And I understood Murakami’s joke about your ‘workout.” ’
Adonis must have dented me a little. I hadn’t even noticed.
“You know about those fights?” I asked.
“Everyone knows about them. The fighters come in here afterward and brag. Sometimes they act like we’re deaf.”
“I wasn’t there voluntarily. I work out at a dojo, some people invited me to a fight. I didn’t know what it was all about. Turned out I wasn’t there to eat. I was supposed to be the main course.”
“Too bad for you,” she whispered.
“If you think I’m with these people,” I said, “why are you talking to me now? Why did you warn me about the listening devices?”
“Because I’m as stupid as you are.” She took a step back and looked at me, her hands on her hips, her chin high. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “Are you afraid to touch me?”
I watched her face. What I wanted was information, not a damn lap dance.
“You’re afraid even to look?” she asked, her smile taunting.
I held her eyes for another moment, then let my gaze go south.
“You like what you see?” she asked.
“It’s okay,” I said after a moment, although in fact it was much better than that.
She turned around and pushed back against me, leaning forward slightly as she did so, molding the back of her body to the front of mine.
I realized suddenly that this was a game I could only lose.
She put her hands on her knees and moved her hips from side to side. The friction from her ass assumed a prominent place in my consciousness.
“You like that?” she asked, looking over her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said again, my voice lower this time, and she laughed.
“It feels like you like it better than ‘okay,’ no?”
“I want to talk to you,” I said. I noticed I had put my hands on her hips. I removed them.
“So talk,” she said, pressing into me harder. “Say anything you like.”
She was trying to divert me. She didn’t want to talk and I didn’t know how to make her.
She arched her back and pushed her ass higher. A shadow formed like a dark pool in the cleft of her lower spine.
“Anything you like,” she said again.
The shadow waxed and waned in time to her movements.
“Cut it out, damn it,” I whispered. My hands were on her hips again.
“But you like it,” she cooed. “I like it, too.”
Disengage, I thought. But my hands stayed put. They were moving now. I watched them as though from afar. The sound of fabric against flesh was loud in the enclosure.
She’s playing you, I thought.
Then: The hell with it. You’re supposed to be acting like an ordinary customer, anyway.