Dance Dance Dance (6 page)

We stood for five minutes in the swirling snow, waiting for a cab. She clung to my arm.

"It's been ages since I felt this relaxed," she said. The same thought occurred to me too. Maybe we really did have something in common, the two of us.

In the taxi we talked about nothing in particular. The snow and chill, her work hours, things in Tokyo. Which left me wondering what was going to happen next. One little push and I could probably sleep with her. I could feel it. Nat-urally I didn't know whether she wanted to sleep with me. But I understood that she wouldn't mind sleeping with me. I could tell from her eyes, how she breathed, the way she talked, even her hand movements. And of course, I knew I wouldn't mind sleeping with her. There probably wouldn't be any complications either. I'd have simply happened through and gone off. Just as she herself had said. Yet, some-how, the resolve failed me. The notion of fairness lingered somewhere in the back of my mind. She was ten years younger than me, more than a little insecure, and she'd had so much to drink she couldn't walk straight. It'd be like call-ing the bets with marked cards. Not fair.

Still, how much jurisdiction does fairness hold over sex? If fairness was what you wanted, your sex life would be an exciting as the algae growing in an aquarium.

The voice of reason.

The debate was still raging when the cab pulled up to her plain, reinforced-concrete apartment building and she briskly swept aside my entire dilemma. "I live with my younger sister," she said.

No further thought on the matter needed or wanted. I actually felt a bit relieved.

But as she got out, she asked if I would see her to her door. Probably no reason for concern, she apologized, but every once in a while, late at night, there'd be a strange man in the hall. I asked the driver to wait for a few minutes, then accompanied her, arm in arm, up the frozen walk. We climbed the two flights of stairs and came to her door marked 306. She opened her purse to fish around for the key. Then she smiled awkwardly and said thanks, she'd had a nice time.

As had I, I assured her.

She unlocked the door and slipped the key back into her purse. The dry snap of her purse shutting resounded down the hall. Then she looked at me directly. In her eyes it was the old geometry problem. She hesitated, couldn't decide how she wanted to say goodbye. I could see it.

Hand on the wall, I waited for her to come to some kind of decision, which didn't seem forthcoming.

"Good night," I said. "Regards to your sister."

For four or five seconds she clamped her lips tight. "The part about living with my sister," she half whispered. "It's not true. Really, I live alone."

"I know," I said.

A slow blush came over her. "How could you know?"

"Can't say why, I just did," I said.

"You're impossible, you know that?"

The driver was reading a sports newspaper when I got back to the cab. He seemed surprised when I climbed back into the taxi and asked him to take me to the Dolphin.

"You really going back?" he said with a smirk. "From the look of things, I was sure you'd be paying me and sending me on. That's the way it usually happens."

"I bet."

"When you do this job as long as I have, your intuition almost never misses."

"When you do the job that long, you're bound to miss sometime. Law of averages."

"Guess so," the cabbie answered, a bit nonplussed. "But still, kinda odd, aren'tcha pal?"

"Maybe so," I said, "maybe so."

Back in my room, I washed up before getting into bed. That was when I started to regret what I'd done—or didn't do—but soon fell fast asleep. My bouts of regret don't usu-ally last very long.

First thing in the morning, I called down to the front desk and extended my stay for another three days. It was the off-season, so they were happy to accommodate me.

Next I bought a newspaper, headed out to a nearby Dunkin' Donuts and had two plain muffins with two large cups of coffee. You get tired of hotel breakfasts in a day. Dunkin' Donuts is just the ticket. It's cheap and you get refills on the coffee.

Then I got in a taxi and told the driver to take me to the biggest library in Sapporo. I looked up back numbers of the magazine the Dolphin Hotel article was supposed to be in and found it in the October 20th issue. I xeroxed it and took it to a nearby coffee shop to read.

The article was confusing to say the least. I had to read it several times before I understood what was going on. The reporter had tried his best to write a straightforward story, but his efforts had been no match for the complexity of the details. Talk about convolution. You had to sit down with it before the general outline emerged. The title, "Sapporo Land Dealings: Dark Hands behind Urban Redevelopment." And printed alongside, an aerial photograph of the nearly com-pleted new Dolphin Hotel.

The long and the short of the story was this: Certain par-ties had bought up a large tract of land in one section of the city of Sapporo. For two years, the names of the new prop-erty holders were moved around, under the surface, in sur-reptitious ways. Land values grew hot for no apparent reason. With very little else to go on, the reporter started his investigation. What he turned up was this: The properties were purchased by various companies, most of which existed only on paper. The companies were fully registered, they paid taxes, but they had no offices and no employees. These paper companies were tied into still other paper companies. Whoever they were, their juggling of property ownership was truly masterful. One property bought at twenty million yen was resold at sixty million, and the next thing you knew it was sold again for two hundred million yen. If you per-sisted in tracing each paper company's holdings back through this maze of interconnecting fortunes, you'd find that they all ended at the same place: B industries, a player of some renown in real estate. Now B industries was a real company, with big, fashionable headquarters in the Akasaka section of Tokyo. And B industries happened to be, at a less-than-public level, connected to A enterprises, a massive conglomerate that encompassed railway lines, a hotel chain, a film company, food services, department stores, magazines, . . . , everything from credit agencies to damage insurance. A enterprises had a direct pipeline to certain political circles, which prompted the reporter to pursue this line of investiga-tion further. Which is how he found out something even more interesting. The area of Sapporo that B industries was so busily buying up was slated for major redevelopment. Already, plans had been set in motion to build subways and to move governmental offices to the area. The greater part of the moneys for the infrastructural projects was to come from the national level. It seems that the national, prefectural, and municipal governments had worked together on the plan-ning and agreed on a comprehensive program for the zoning and scale and budget. But when you lifted up this "cover," it was obvious that every square meter of the sites for redevel-opment had been systematically bought up over the last few years. Someone was leaking information to A enterprises, and, moreover, the leak existed well before the redevelop-ment plans were finalized. Which also suggested that, politi-cally speaking, the final plans had been a fait accompli probably from the very beginning.

And this is where the Dolphin Hotel entered the picture. It was the spearhead of this collusive cornering of real estate. First of all, the Dolphin Hotel secured prime real estate. Hence, A enterprises could set up offices in this new chrome-and-marble wonder as its local base of operations. The place was both a beacon and a watchtower, a visible symbol of change as well as a nerve center which could redi-rect the flow of people in the district. Everything was pro-ceeding according to the most intricate plans.

That's advanced capitalism for you: The player making the maximum capital investment gets the maximum critical information in order to reap the maximum desired profit with maximum capital efficiency—and nobody bats an eye. It's just part of putting down capital these days. You demand the most return for your capital outlay. The person buying a used car will kick the tires and check under the hood, and the conglomerate putting down one hundred billion yen will check over the finer points of where that capital's going, and occasionally do a little fiddling. Fairness has got nothing to do with it. With that kind of money on the line, who's going to sit around considering abstract things like that?

Sometimes they even force hands.

For instance, suppose there's someone who doesn't want to sell. Say, a long-established shoe store. That's when the tough guys come out of the woodwork. Huge companies have their connections, and you can bet they count everyone from politicians and novelists and rock stars to out-and-out yakuza in their fold. So they just call on the boys with their samurai swords. The police are never too eager to deal with matters like this, especially since arrangements have already been made up at the top. It's not even corruption. That's how the system works. That's capital investment. Granted, this sort of thing isn't new to the modern age. But everything before is nothing compared to the exacting detail and sheer power and invulnerability of today's web of capitalism. And it's megacomputers that have made it all possible, with their inhuman capacity to pull every last factor and condition on the face of the earth into their net calculations. Advanced capitalism has transcended itself. Not to overstate things, financial dealings have practically become a religious activ-ity. The new mysticism. People worship capital, adore its aura, genuflect before Porsches and Tokyo land values. Wor-shiping everything their shiny Porsches symbolize. It's the only stuff of myth that's left in the world.

Latter-day capitalism. Like it or not, it's the society we live in. Even the standard of right and wrong has been subdi-vided, made sophisticated. Within good, there's fashionable good and unfashionable good, and ditto for bad. Within fashionable good, there's formal and then there's casual; there's hip, there's cool, there's trendy, there's snobbish. Mix 'n' match. Like pulling on a Missoni sweater over Trussardi slacks and Pollini shoes, you can now enjoy hybrid styles of morality. It's the way of the world—philosophy starting to look more and more like business administration.

Although I didn't think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today's sophistication, who's in a position to throw rocks? Who's going to brave what tear gas? C'mon, that's the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you.

The reporter had devoted a lot of energy to following the paper trail. Still, despite his outcry—or rather, all the more because of his outcry—the article curiously lacked punch. A rallying cry it wasn't. The guy just didn't seem to realize: Nothing about this was suspect. It was a natural state of affairs. Ordinary, the order of the day, common knowledge. Which is why nobody cared. If huge capital interests obtained information illegally and bought up property, forced a few political decisions, then clinched the deal by having yakuza extort a little shoe store here, maybe beat up the owner of some small-time, end-of-the-line hotel there, so what? That's life, man. The sand of the times keeps running out from under our feet. We're no longer standing where we once stood.

The reporter had done everything he could. The article was well researched, full of righteous indignation, and hope-lessly untrendy.

I folded it, slipped it into my pocket, and drank another cup of coffee.

I thought about the owner of the old Dolphin. Mister Unlucky, shadowed by defeat since birth. No way he could have made the cut for this day and age.

"Untrendy!" I said out loud.

A waitress gave me a disturbed look.

I took a taxi back to the hotel.

8

From my room I rang up my ex-partner in Tokyo. Some-body I didn't know answered the phone and asked my name, then somebody else came on the line and asked my name, then finally my expartner came to the phone. He seemed busy. It had been close to a year since we'd spoken. Not that I'd been consciously avoiding him; I simply didn't have anything to talk to him about. I'd always liked him, and still did. But the fact was, my ex-partner was for me (and I for him) "foregone territory." Again, not that we'd pushed each other into that position. We'd just gone our own separate ways, and those two paths didn't seem to cross. No more, no less.

So how's it going? I asked him.

Well enough, he said.

I told him I was in Sapporo. He asked me if it was cold.

Yeah, it's cold, I answered.

How's work? was my next question.

Busy, his one-word response.

Not hitting the bottle too much, I hoped.

Not lately, he wasn't drinking much these days.

And was it snowing up here? His turn to ask.

Not at the moment, I kept the ball in the air.

We were almost through with our polite toss-and-catch.

"Listen," I broke in, "I've got a favor to ask." I'd done him one a long while back. Both he and I remembered it. Otherwise, I'm not the type to go asking favors of people.

"Sure," he said with no formalities.

"You remember when we worked on that in-house news-letter for that hotel group?" I asked. "Maybe five years ago?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"Tell me, is that connection still alive?"

He gave it a moment's thought. "Can't say it's kicking, but it's alive as far as alive goes. Not impossible to warm it up if necessary."

"There was one guy who knew a lot about what was going on in the industry. I forget his name. Skinny guy, always wore this funny hat. You think you can get in contact with him?"

"I think so. What do you want to know?"

I gave him a brief rundown on the Dolphin scandal arti-cle. He took down the date the piece appeared. Then I told him about the old, tiny Dolphin that was here before the present monster Dolphin and said I'd like to know more about the following things: First, why had the new hotel kept the old Dolphin name? Second, what was the fate of the old owner? And last, were there any recent developments on the scandal front?

He jotted it all down and read it back to me over the phone.

"That's it?"

"That'll do," I said.

"Probably in a hurry, too, huh?" he asked.

"Sorry, but—"

"I'll see what I can do today. What's your number up there?"

I gave it to him.

"Talk to you later," he said and hung up.

I had a simple lunch in a cafe in the hotel. Then I went down to the lobby and saw that the young woman with glasses was behind the counter. I took a seat in a corner of the lobby and watched her. She was busy at work and didn't seem to notice me. Or maybe she did, but was playing cool. It didn't really matter, I guess. I liked seeing her there. As I thought to myself, I could have slept with her if I wanted to.

There are times when I need to chat myself up like that.

After I'd watched her enough, I took the elevator back to my room and read a book. The sky outside was heavy with clouds, making me feel like I was living in a poorly lit stage set. I didn't know when my ex-partner would call back, so I didn't want to go out, which left me little else to do but read. I soon finished the Jack London and started in on the Spanish Civil War.

It was a day like a slow-motion video of twilight. Uneventful, to put it mildly. The lead gray of the sky mixed ever so slowly with black, finally blending into night. Just another quality of melancholy. As if there were only two col-ors in the world, gray and black, shifting back and forth at regular intervals.

I dialed room service and had them send up a sandwich, which I ate a bite at a time between sips of a beer. When there's nothing to do, you do nothing slowly and intently. At seven-thirty, my expartner rang.

"I got ahold of the guy," he said.

"A lot of trouble?"

"Mmm, some," he said after a slight pause, making it obvious that it had been extremely difficult. "Let me run through everything with you. I suppose you could say the lid was shut pretty tight on this one. And not just shut, it was bolted down and locked away in a vault. No one had access to it. Case closed. No dirt to be dug up anymore. Seems there might have been some small irregularities in govern-ment or city hall. Nothing important, just fine tuning, as they say. Nobody knows any more than that. The Attorney's Office snooped around, but couldn't come up with anything incriminating. Lots of lines running through this one. Hot stuff. It was hard to get anything out of anyone."

"This concern of mine is personal. It won't make trouble for anyone."

"That's exactly what I told the guy."

Still holding the receiver, I reached over to the refrigerator to get another beer, and poured it into a glass.

"At the risk of sounding like your mother, a word to the wise: If you're going to pry, you're going to get hurt," my ex-partner said. "This one, it seems, is big, real big. I don't know what you've got going there, but I wouldn't get in too deep if I were you. Think of your age and standing, you ought to live out your life more peaceably. Not that I'm the best example, mind you."

"Gotcha," I said.

He coughed. I took another sip of beer.

"About the old Dolphin owner, seems the guy didn't give in until the very last, which brought him a lot of grief. Should've walked right out of there, but he just wouldn't leave. Couldn't read the big picture."

"He was that type," I said. "Very untrendy."

"He got the bad end of the business. A bunch of yakuza moved into the hotel and had a field day. Nothing so bad as to bother the law. They set up court in the lobby, and stared down anyone who walked into the place. You get the idea, no? Still, the guy held out for the count."

"I can see it," I said. The owner of the Dolphin Hotel was well acquainted with misery in its various forms. No small measure of misfortune was going to faze him.

"In the end, the Dolphin came out with the strangest counteroffer. Your guy told them he'd pack up shop on one condition. And you know what that was?"

"Haven't a clue," I said.

"Take a guess. Think, man, just a bit. It's the answer to one of your other questions."

"On the condition that they kept the Dolphin Hotel name. Is that it?"

"Bingo," he said. "Those were the terms, and that's what the buyers agreed to."

"But c'mon, why?"

"It's not such a bad name. 'Dolphin Hotel' sounds fair enough, as names go."

"Well, I guess," I said.

"What's more, this hotel was supposed to be the flagship for a whole new chain of hotels that A enterprises was planning. Luxury hotels, not their usual top-of-the-middle class. And they didn't have a name for it yet."

"Voila! The Dolphin Hotel Chain."

"Right. A chain to rival the Hiltons and Hyatts of the world."

"The Dolphin Hotel Chain," I tried it out one more time. A heritage passed on, a dream unfurled. "So then what hap-pened to the old Dolphin owner?"

"Who knows?"

I took another sip of my beer and scratched my ear with the tip of my pen.

"When he left they gave him a good chunk of money, so he could be doing almost anything. But there's no way to trace him. He was a bit player, just passing through."

"I suppose."

"And that's about it," said my ex-partner. "That's all I could find out. Nothing more. Will that do you?"

"Thanks. You've been loads of help," I said.

He cleared his throat.

"You out some dough?" I asked.

"Nah," he said. "I'll buy the guy dinner, then take him to a club in Ginza, pay his carfare home. That's not a lot, so forget about it. I can write it off as expenses anyway. Every-thing's deductible. Hell, my accountant tells me all the time to spend more. So don't worry about it. If you ever feel like going to a Ginza club, let me know. It'll be on me. Seeing as you've never been to any of those places."

"And what's the attraction of a Ginza club?"

"Booze, girls," he said. "Kind words from my tax accountant."

"Why don't you go with him?"

"I did, not so long ago," he said, sounding absolutely bored.

We said our good-byes and hung up.

I started to think about my ex-partner. He was the same age as me, and already he was getting a paunch. All kinds of prescription drugs in his desk. Actually concerned about who won elections. Worried about his kids' education. He was always fighting with his wife, but basically he was a real family man. He had his weaknesses to be sure, he was known to drink too much, but he was a hardworking, straightforward kind of guy. In every sense of the word.

We'd teamed up right after college and gotten on pretty well. It was a small translation business, and it gradually expanded in scale. We weren't exactly the closest of friends, but we made a fine enough partnership. We saw each other every day like that, but we never fought once. He was quiet and well-mannered, and I myself wasn't the arguing type. We had our differences, but managed to keep working together out of mutual respect. But when something unfore-seen came up, we split up, perhaps at the best time too. He got started again, kept up both ends of the business, maybe better than when we were together, honestly. That is, if his client list is anything to go on. The company got bigger, he got a whole new crew. Even psychologically, he seemed a lot more secure.

More likely I was the one with problems. And I probably exerted a not-so-healthy influence over him. Which helps to explain why he was able to find his way after I left. Fawning and flattering to get the best out of his people, cracking stupid jokes with the woman who keeps the books, dutifully taking clients out to Ginza clubs no matter how dull he found it. He might have been too nervous to do that if I were still around. He was always aware of how I saw him, worried about what I would think. That was the kind of guy he was. Though, to tell the truth, I didn't pay a lot of attention to what he was doing next to me.

Good he's his own man now. In every way.

That is, by my leaving, he wasn't afraid to act his age, and he came into his own.

So where did that leave me?

At nine o'clock the phone rang. I wasn't expecting a call —nobody besides my ex-partner knew I was here—so at first the sound of the phone ringing didn't register. After four rings I picked up the receiver.

"You were watching me in the lobby today, weren't you?" It was my receptionist friend. She didn't seem angry, but then she wasn't exactly happy either. Her voice was without equivocation.

"Yes, I was," I admitted.

Silence.

"I don't like it when people watch me while I'm working. It makes me nervous and I start making mistakes. I could feel your eyes on me the whole time."

"Sorry, I won't stare at you again," I said. "I was only watching you to give myself confidence. I didn't think you'd get so nervous. From now on I'll be more careful. Where are you calling from?"

"Home," she answered. "I'm just about to take a bath and go to bed. You extended your stay, didn't you?"

"Uh-huh. Business got postponed a bit."

Another short silence.

"Do you think I'm too nervous?" she asked.

"I don't know. It's a different thing for everybody. But in any case, I promise not to stare again. I don't want to ruin your work."

She thought it over a second, then we said good night.

I hung up the phone, took a bath, and stretched out on the sofa reading until eleven-thirty. Then I dressed and stepped out into the hall. I walked it from one end to the other. It was like a maze. At the farthest recess was the staff elevator, a little hidden from view, next to the emergency staircase. If you followed the signs pointing past the guest rooms, you came to an elevator marked freight only. I stood before it, noting that the elevator was stopped on the ground floor. No one seemed to be using it. From speakers in the ceiling came the strains of "Love Is Blue." Paul Mauriat.

I pressed the button. The elevator roused itself and started to ascend. The digital display registered the floors—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6— slowly but surely advancing, to the rhythm of the music. If someone was in the elevator, I could always plead ignorance. It was a mistake guests were probably making all the time. 11, 12, 13, 14—and rising steadily. I took one step back, dug my hands in my pockets, and waited for the doors to open.

15—the count stopped. There was a moment's pause, and not a sound, then the door slid open. The elevator was empty.

Awfully quiet, I thought to myself. A far cry from that wheezing contraption in the old hotel. I got in and pressed 16. The door shut, soundlessly, again, I felt a slight move-ment, and the door opened. The sixteenth floor. Bright, fully lit, with "Love Is Blue" flowing out of the ceiling. No dark-ness, no musty odor. For good measure, I walked the entire floor from end to end. It proved to have the exact same lay-out as the fifteenth. Same winding hallways, same in ter-minable array of guest rooms, same vending machine alcove midway along, same bank of guest elevators.

The carpet was deep red, rich with soft pile. You couldn't hear your own footsteps. In fact, everything was resound-ingly hushed. There was only "A Summer Place," probably by Percy Faith. After getting to the end, I turned around and walked back halfway to where the guest elevators were and took one down to the fifteenth floor. Then I went through the whole routine all over again. Staff elevator to the six-teenth floor, where there was the same, perfectly ordinary, well-lit floor as before. And it was still "A Summer Place."

I gave up and went down to the fifteenth floor again, had two sips of brandy and hit the sack.

At dawn, the black changed back to gray. It was snowing. Well now, I thought, what do I do today?

As usual, there wasn't anything to do.

I walked in the snow to Dunkin' Donuts, chewed on a couple doughnuts, and read the morning paper as I sipped my coffee. I skimmed through an article about local elec-tions. I looked through the movie listings. Nothing I particu-larly wanted to see, but there was this one film featuring a former junior high school classmate of mine. A teen angst movie by the title of Unrequited Love, with an up-and-com-ing teenage actress and an up-and-coming teenage singer. I could guess the sort of role my classmate would play: hand-some, young teacher with his wits about him, tall, slim, allaround athlete, girls swooning all over him. Naturally the lead girl has a crush on him. So she spends Sunday baking cookies and takes them to his apartment. But there's a boy who's got his eyes on her. Average boy, kind of shy, . . . Typi-cal. I could see the movie without seeing it.