Girl in a Box (29 page)

Michael was kissing me, but this time, not my mouth. He was going along every inch of my body, as if he were memorizing it for an exam, while all I wanted to do was throw away the book. I ran my fingers through his short, razor-cut hair, whispering to him how he'd changed my life forever, and for the better. Then a siren started to blare. The police were coming, all because I'd dragged him into breaking OCI rules…

I blinked my eyes open and saw that the alarm clock on the table next to me was buzzing. I shut off the clock and rolled over on my stomach, pressing my legs together. I was still hot from the dream, but now I felt overwhelmingly guilty. I was in rebound mode, that was all it was. I knew that at some point and time I would find someone to take Hugh's place, but I was vastly upset with my subconscious for suggesting that the man could be Michael.

I raised myself on my elbows and peered into the suite's living room, where the object of my lust was sprawled across the couch, a blanket half fallen revealing a flash of checked cotton boxer shorts. Michael did not want to make love to me. What had happened that strange night in the apartment had been a case of method acting gone wild. I would never again allow myself to forget that Michael was the consummate spy, who would do anything needed to keep our covers intact.

I sat up, wrapping the bedsheet close around me, and surveyed the suite through the soft light filtering through the window shade. The bedroom and living room had been pristine when I'd come in, but now I saw my carry-on bag, as well as a hodgepodge of boxes and electronic equipment that had come from the apartment. I couldn't remember hearing Michael come in. Then I had a second, horrifying thought: that I might have talked in my sleep. And how many dreams might I have had over the night? It wasn't the first time I'd dreamed about Michael. I'd dreamed about him back in Washington, too, but tried to forget it because I was still in love with Hugh.

Not anymore. My feelings for Hugh might never completely disappear, but they felt blurred, the way objects in the hotel suite had appeared when I'd first opened my eyes.

I wore the sheet around me like a toga as I picked some clothes out of the carry-on, embarrassed that Michael had handled my dirty laundry as well as the clean clothes, and went into the bathroom for a hot shower. I shampooed, shaved my legs, and moisturized, all with the hotel's fancy organic toiletries. After I'd blown my hair dry and put on my standard Japanese makeup, half an hour had passed. I stepped out of the bathroom, fully dressed, and heard the sounds of NHK news. I peeked into the living room and saw that Michael was awake, wearing a T-shirt and shorts and watching the news on a large flat-screen TV.

“I think you finally slept through the night,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Not really.” Michael yawned. “I only got in at three, after Brian and I packed out the apartment completely and moved everything over. I see you found your clothes?”

“Yes, thanks. I'm sorry I wasn't up when you came in. I wanted to ask you—did it look as if anyone had gotten inside the apartment?”

“Yes. But the listening station didn't appear to be detected. We took it out, as a precaution, in case anyone comes back.” Michael yawned again. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Ten after seven. I have a bit of time before I go to work, if you want to have coffee and talk some more.” I'd spied the coffeemaker and was already filling the carafe with water in the bathroom.

“You're not going to work.”

“What do you mean? I have a cover to maintain—”

“You are in hiding,” Michael said, stepping into the bathroom behind me. “And if by now you don't understand the reason, you'll never survive as an agent.”

“But if I don't show up at the K Team, I'll be in trouble. And that will bring attention to me.”

“Mrs. Taki has orders to telephone Personnel when it opens. She'll pose as your mother calling in for you because you're too ill to speak. Miyo will believe it, given that you partied the night before.”

I shook my head. “All I drank was club soda, and I left the party early. She'll know something's wrong.”

“Who cares? I'm more concerned about whether this hotel is secure enough or if I should move you to the New Sanno until you can fly out, but I don't think they'd do a good job with your hair.”

“What do you mean about my hair?” I touched it. Had my blow-dry been that bad?

“I can't risk you leaving the hotel to buy a wig somewhere. Inside the hotel spa, you'll be able to get a cut and color change. Back in the States, you can reverse it to whatever you want.”

So he really didn't want me to be recognized. And I was really going home. I said, “I wonder if you would treat a male agent this protectively.”

“The order came from Len Novak, back at Langley,” Michael said. “If you go against my boss's order, you'll probably get us both fired. Is that what you want?”

“Of course not.” If I were to lose my career at OCI because I'd blown my cover on this job, I'd regret it heartily—and if I screwed things up for Michael, I would feel just as bad. He was a spy, pure and simple; it wasn't as if he could fall back on selling antiques the way that I could.

“Now, let's move on to the rest of the discussion.” He pointed an accusatory finger at my carry-on. “That bag contains most of your recent purchases. You can take it all back to the States to wear there if you like, but not in this town. The clothing you're wearing now—it's new, isn't it?”

“The Comme des Garçons pants are new.” I gestured toward the strap-and-buckle pants; I was wearing them with a peach ruffle-edged chiffon blouse from Rachel's Diary that I'd bought at Matsuya a few years back. Underneath it all was one of the infamous Tsumori Chisato bras, which I supposed I should count as well because the blouse was semitransparent.

“The forty-thousand-yen Comme des Garçons purchase, I remember that well.”

“Hold on. Those pants were twenty-five-five with my discount,” I said.

“Thirty-eight thousand plus five percent tax was the total I saw on a printout that I packed up in your room. Do you know what that means? Almost four hundred dollars for a pair of cotton canvas work pants that I could have bought for you at a military uniform shop for thirty dollars!”

“Show me the data.” I folded my arms and stared him down, because I knew what I'd paid. I'd given Michael the Mitsutan sales receipts a few days earlier, along with the filled-out governmental expense account form.

This conversation was ridiculous. I'd never, ever gotten flack from anyone before. My former lovers had been spendthrifts, in fact, and never would have suggested my buying clothes at a military supply store. But then again, Michael was an aristocratic Yankee, which meant cheap.

“Here!” Michael crowed, holding aloft two sheets of paper he'd removed from a box. “My proof. And once we settle this, let's get back to the business you're evading.”

He handed me the printout Miyo had ripped off the computer just before we'd gone out to Roppongi Hills on Friday night. I hadn't looked at it before, because that would take too much time: it was neatly typed in katakana, not English.

“You read this?” I looked at Michael in shock.

“Did you think I can't read Japanese? Come on, I'm director of OCI's Japan division.”

“I know, but you always asked me for translated transcripts. And I've hardly heard you speak.”

“Speaking Japanese doesn't come easily to me, and I wouldn't trust myself to handle translations. But I can read the hiragana and katakana alphabets; I learned in elementary school, when my dad was stationed at Yokosuka.”

I returned to the paperwork. Unbelievably, it said that the pants were almost 40,000 yen. My bras were also several thousand yen more expensive than I'd thought—apiece. My Issey Miyake crinkle-cotton jacket was 29,200, not 22,250, as I'd recalled seeing on my sales receipt at the time of purchase. And the Coach backpack I thought I'd paid 34,000 for was actually 46,000.

“I don't understand it,” I said slowly. “It's more than the price tags said at the time—I'm almost certain.”

“Soldiers throughout Iraq don't have armored vehicles, and our government is spending more than four hundred fifty dollars on a fashionable backpack! Thank God we don't have anyone from the press corps embedded with us who could expose this—this Back-packgate!”

I shook my head. “You would never hit me with this garbage if you really knew me. I'm a bargain shopper. I lived in vintage clothing and my mom's hand-me-downs for my entire twenties. I would never lose control of the amount of money I'm spending. Something's fishy about this. I just—I just didn't spend this much. Ever.” I stabbed at the paper with a fingernail that badly needed a manicure. “The paper you're looking at is an internal computer record at Mitsutan. It's not like the receipts that I signed and took away with me. Those signed receipts are the real evidence that I can use to fight the charges.”

“If it's an internal computer record—how did you get it?” Michael's expression had turned from anger to curiosity.

“Miyo messed around with my computer at the K Team desk one night and printed it out. She was concerned because my credit card had been rejected when I tried to buy a coat on Friday night.”

“A coat which she bought and you reimbursed her for.”

“That's correct.”

Michael poured a cup of coffee and handed it to me. He'd forgotten the milk. “These records might actually be significant. If I could just get another one, compare it with another cardholder's receipts…”

“We need mine first,” I said. “Will you go back to the Sanno today to pick them up?” I picked up the printout and looked it over again. “I'm not a mathematical genius, as you know, but it looks as if this record shows there was no subtraction of the employee discount, but actually an addition of fifteen percent to the regular retail price—plus the corresponding sales tax. I'd like to see if everything I bought was inflated in the same pattern—that would be interesting, wouldn't it?”

Michael was no longer looking scornful, I was pleased to notice; he was just attentive.

I continued to explain my theory, which was slowly evolving. If Mitsutan's internal records, with inflated amounts of profit, were the official data shared with the public, Mitsutan would seem more profitable. And why would the government suspect anything? Mitsutan was paying its taxes, and it was reporting numbers that would prove the prime minister's economic reforms were working.

“Tell me, who runs the accounting department at Mitsutan?” Michael asked when I was through.

“A Mr. Sato does now, but Enobu Mitsuyama did until he was appointed general manager of the Ginza store.”

“So it could be that Mr. Sato created the corruption—”

“Or that Enobu Mitsuyama rigged the accounting and then switched out of the job so he would never be subject to blame if the scheme was exposed. The profits started surging about three years ago, when he became general manager,” I reminded my boss.

“It would be in his interest to do it at that time,” Michael said slowly. “If anything were to be uncovered, he could argue that he couldn't be held accountable—since it was Sato's department. Of course, the senior Mitsuyama couldn't be blamed either, because he's just chairman of the board. It seems awfully risky, though—”

I shrugged. “Lots of people are willing to take risks. I never spoke a word to Warren last night—per your request—but I found out about some rather extraordinary risk-taking of his own. Ravi told me about a pattern of cash deposits of small bills being funneled through Winston Brothers. No return address, but the Japanese workers there, and Warren Kravitz, seem to know exactly who it comes from.”

Michael folded his arms across his chest and studied me. “Our second mystery, the one totally unconnected to what's going on at Mitsutan.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But it's definitely intriguing,” I said. I rummaged through my purse and picked out the halves of the wax seal, which I'd been keeping carefully in a handkerchief. I put them down on the coffee table in front of Michael. “This was the seal on the envelope of cash Melanie used for her shopping. I didn't think much about it at the time, but when I showed it to Ravi, he confirmed that this wax seal is just like one he saw on big envelopes of money he'd seen coming into the bank.”

“Really.” Michael was staring at the seal with a horrified expression.

“I want to know whose seal this is. Maybe, if you brought some of those
yakuza
books from the apartment, we could take a look—”

“I can tell you whose seal it is.” Michael swallowed hard. “It's the symbol for Kanazawa-kai, one of the upcoming gangs. I know about them because of a case I worked on, a couple of years back, that dealt with drug trafficking through Asia.”

“Are you sure?” I'd hoped that the seal would mean something, but this was almost too scary to comprehend. No wonder Ravi's attempt to alert his boss to money laundering was being stonewalled.

“Yes,” Michael said shortly. He rummaged through a box and came up with one of the
yakuza
books. He flipped through it and showed me an illustration.

“I'm amazed that they would leave such a blatant sign of their identity on an envelope. I mean, they are breaking the law—”

“Rei, I've seen
yakuza
walking around with lapel pins. They're part of the established infrastructure of Japan.”

I sucked in my breath. “So Warren is friends with gangsters, which means that gangster money is coming into a major American bank, which means that our economy is already tainted.”

“Please don't make me feel any sicker than I do already.” Michael put his head in his hands. “I don't know what bearing this has on the Mitsutan investigation. Obviously, the Kanazawa-kai aren't involved in Mitsutan, because if Warren's cooperating with this gang, he wouldn't dare do something to hurt their interests.”