Japantown (14 page)

“Who knows? Everyone was making a fuss over it, that’s all.”

“Do you know why?”

“Of course not.”

Right. There was a limit to what I could draw out from the effusive Lizza. I changed tack again. “Back to your sister. Is there anything either she or her husband might have become involved in that could have put them in danger?”

“My sister? Never.” Lizza’s tone was adamant. “You have the wrong side of the family. My father and I are the risk takers. Hiroshi and Eiko were so modest.”

“Well, your father seemed to think you could tell me
something
.”

My frustration must have seeped through because her voice dropped half an octave and the party girl disappeared. “No one ever really knows what Father thinks. That is the one thing you should understand about Father.”

“I see.”

“But don’t worry. Do what I do. Ignore him and you’ll get along just fine.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

Lizza studied me, suddenly solemn and focused. “Do you have any ideas yet about what happened, Jim-san?”

“I’m just getting started, but I’m committed. And the police are on top of it. A lot of police.”

“Good. But remember. Father chose
you
. And if there’s one thing Father knows, it’s people. He expects
you
to find the killer, and I believe you will.”

Then, abruptly, the interview was over. Without warning, just like
her father. She stood and extended her right hand, thumb straight up, hand cocked at that peculiar, self-conscious angle women use when they want to project a businesslike image.

Abers and I rose. We shook the outstretched hand in turns and we escorted her to the front of the shop.

When she saw the limousine, she paused. “You know, I may never be able to look at a limo again without thinking of my afternoon at the beach with my sister and the kids.”

Again the tears fell and the paparazzi clicked. To her credit Lizza ignored the shutterbugs, striding through the front door with her head held high and sliding into her sleek black machine with her dignity intact.

As the limo pulled into traffic, an uneasy feeling overtook me. Without knowing why, I was suddenly certain I’d let her go too soon. That I’d missed something. Or worse, that she’d skillfully danced around my probing.

Lizza had arrived with press hounds fawning over her. I dashed an email off to Noda and set a different sort of hound after her.

Noda’s response was immediate and chilling—but came from an entirely new direction.

CHAPTER 20

A
ROUND
midnight, I was staring out my window at the Golden Gate Bridge silhouetted behind a wispy veil of fog when the phone rang. I spent a lot of time gazing at the bridge. It was a touchstone. Something in me vibrated to its unspoken promise, which was why I took the apartment, despite the cramped bedrooms and high rent.

The phone rang again. With Jenny upstairs, I had no need to worry about the noise.

“Brodie here.”

“
Noda desu.
Got news,” he said in Japanese.

Kunio Noda always spat out his words in short, clipped tones. Even over the telephone, Brodie Security’s chief detective bristled with the heightened energy of a vigilant pit bull. He was as lovable as your garden-variety boulder, and talked considerably less. He had a flat face, shrewd eyes, and a barrel chest on a five-foot-six frame that people gave way to instinctively when he walked down the street. Below a hard, unforgiving forehead was a segmented eyebrow where a yakuza pimp had once connected with the edge of a blade in a failed attempt to carve up the detective’s face. The resultant scar did not soften Noda’s image. He could pass for a local thug if not for the eyes, which had some give in them.

I said, “What kind of news? About Lizza?”

He snorted. “
Chigau. Mondai da.
”

No. Trouble.

“Let’s hear it.”

“The linguist disappeared,” he said, without wastage, as if his verbal
efforts cost him in coin. On occasion, when he was feeling frisky, the terse detective strung together a dozen words.

Disappeared? A shiver of fear brushed the back of my neck. “You mean the whiz kid who had the kanji on his database?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Soga-jujo.”

The town connected with the kanji.

“Didn’t you tell him to stay away?”

“Mochiron,”
he snapped. Of course. “Went out there on his own anyway.”

My questions grew urgent. “He call anyone after he got there?”

“His wife. Once.”

“When?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“From a cell phone?”

“No, a
ryokan
.” From a Japanese inn. “When he checked in.”

“You ring them?”

“First thing.”

“And?” Sometimes extracting answers from Noda was like trying to coax a mole into sunlight.

“Went for a walk and never came back.”

I cast a last line of hope. “Are you sure? You can’t get any more harmless than a linguist.”

“I’m sure.”

“We’re talking about a Waseda professor, dammit.”

“A Waseda U professor openly asking around about a kanji linked to a multiple murder in San Francisco.”

When the testy detective did muster his verbal faculties, he could be hard to argue with. He had voiced one of my worst fears: Japantown was too violent, too bold, to be a one-off event.

“You just may have a point.”

“Yep.” I heard him shuffling papers.

The case was growing stranger by the hour. The SFPD had nothing, I had nothing, and the street had nothing. A linguist at Waseda attaches a location to the kanji, I am shadowed by an unequivocal out-of-towner,
then the linguist skips off to Soga-jujo and promptly vanishes, giving us in the process what could turn out to be our first lead.

The kanji and the linguist both pointed westward—toward Japan.

The crackle of papers on Noda’s end rose to the pitch of heavy static.

I said, “Guess I’d better get over there. I’ll call for a flight.”

“Did that. Japan Airlines out at nine a.m.”

I said, “There is a definite upside to dealing with a pro.”

“Confirmation number’s here somewhere.” More papers were scrambled. “You got anything for me?”

I filled him in on my talks with Hara, Lizza, and Renna, then asked him to check Hara’s movements around the time the mogul became interested in Teq QX, the high-tech chip company. As an afterthought, I threw in the story about my shadow and
his
vanishing act.

Noda came alive. “This alley, you’ve seen it?”

“Many times.”

“Tell me.”

I sketched the no-exit abutment of the three Victorians.

Noda grunted in displeasure. “You got a gun?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Carry it.”

“I can handle myself. You know that.”

“Brodie, you’re fast and you’re good. Pack the gun. Might give you a chance.”

My chest tightened. “Want to give me a reason?”

“ ‘Why’ can wait until you get here. If you get here.”

“If?”

“Don’t play hero. Most people never see them coming.”

A shudder shook my whole body. What the chief detective said felt right, even if I couldn’t understand why.

“Get to Tokyo, Brodie. They don’t kill in their own backyard.”

“You got something?”

“What I’m
thinking
could get us killed. Get to Tokyo. You make it in one piece, then we’ll talk.”

He cut the connection.

CHAPTER 21

O
GI’S
cell phone chirped. He was at home, sipping a ten-year-old saké from Nara. Adjusting the collar of his indigo
samue,
a traditional Japanese men’s garment with a kimono-like top and loose-fitting pants in the same rich blue hue, he reached for his handset. The three double magnums of 1900 Château Margaux from his recent Swiss excursion stood on a side table. Soon he would slot them into his wine cellar but for now he enjoyed watching the way soft light played off the bottles.

Ogi hit the encode button and said in Japanese, “Speak.”

“It’s time to take Brodie out.”

Dermott was getting trigger-happy again. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Ogi said, “I doubt it. Tell me what happened.”

Muscled, swift-footed, and unstoppable, Dermott was a brilliant fighting machine. His mental agility was another matter. Allowing him to lead his own team had been a logistical miscalculation that would not be repeated. Superb soldiers did not always yield good field commanders.

Now his top soldier shocked him for the second time in two days: “The art dealer made our tail. I put Gus on it.”

Idiots! Patience, patience . . .

In their hometown of Soga-jujo, Gus Harper had been born Hideo Hattori. He was their finest shadow man, having studied with the Israeli Mossad for eighteen months by special arrangement.
Nobody
spotted him, just as nobody fended off Dermott, Ogi’s best shooter and hand-to-hand combat man after Lawrence Casey. With the string
of high-tech listening devices in place at Brodie’s home and shop, tail jobs were kept to a minimum. Whenever possible, Ogi preferred his people to arrive ahead of time. The meet at the M&N with the police lieutenant was a prime example. A parabolic mike in a vacated office across the street captured the whole conversation. Someone must have fumbled the changeover if Brodie caught Gus in the act.

“Who missed their switch?” Ogi asked.

“No one. Brodie was smooth. Gus didn’t know he was blown until the cops showed up.”

Ogi was at once exasperated and intrigued. Not impossible, he thought, considering the art dealer’s lineage.
Kaeru no ko wa kaeru.
The spawn of a frog is still a frog.
Yappari,
Jake Brodie’s son had inherited a large measure of his father’s talent, which he was squandering in his present occupation. Unless the art shop was a cover. Could it be? No, impossible. The kid inherited half of his father’s business, so he dabbled. Posted a small brass plaque outside his pottery shop. But he had no training.

Though masked, Ogi’s fury was unmistakable. “Keep your distance, then.”

“If you say so. But the activity here is like the rush to Meiji Shrine at New Year’s, sir. Cops, Lizza Hara, the Japanese press, calls from Tokyo.”

Lizza Hara? Tokyo? Those would need checking. But later. For now, patience was essential, and Ogi possessed more than enough to counter Dermott’s eternal edginess. Which is why so few men were qualified to lead. They panic or overreact. With the right motivation, willing trainees could be molded into precision killing machines, but leadership—that was another matter entirely. From his tenth year, Ogi had been groomed by his father, and his father by his grandfather. In fourteen generations, stretching back three hundred years to the general himself, the Ogi clan had built an invisible dynasty because leadership had been instilled from the earliest years. They came from hardy samurai stock. They were the shadow’s shadow. The Ogi clan bred men of strategy, men of vision, men who knew the hearts of their fighters. Who knew when to yield and when to be ruthless. Utterly ruthless. Only a handful of outsiders had ever come close to penetrating Soga’s core and
each had been eliminated without fuss or trace when the time came. Dermott’s excitability was premature, to say the least.

“Brodie’s going through the motions for his police friend,” Ogi said. “Calling in a Japan hand—the lieutenant’s a little smarter than most. But so what? When all of the police leads dry up, Brodie’s friend will be demoted and reassigned and Brodie will return to selling prints and pots.”

“He’s going to be in our hair for a while. He’s flying to Tokyo.”

“Why?”

“A phone call. He’s been warned about us.”

Dermott relayed the essence of the conversation about the missing linguist. Ogi listened, neither alarmed nor surprised. Brodie was shrewd enough to know who to ask, and reach out to someone clever enough to ferret out the kanji on short notice. Ogi recognized talent when he saw it. Maybe they’d have to deal with Brodie in the end after all. But for the moment, maintaining the status quo was paramount.

“They don’t know much but I’ll notify the village,” Ogi said.

“Let me take him out.”

“No.
Not
in San Francisco. The police would notice and our client would not appreciate the extra attention.”

“Tokyo then? I can catch an earlier flight.”

Ogi reminded himself that Dermott’s eagerness was a trait he cultivated in his people. “You know that’s taboo.”

“Do you think he’ll go to the village?”

“I don’t know.”

“Couldn’t I just—”

“No. Your job is to watch. By now you must have uncovered some leverage.”

Three thousand miles away, Dermott smiled for the first time.

“Yes, sir. He has a daughter.”

Ogi could hear the smile in his loyal soldier’s voice and returned the sentiment. “What could be better?”

CHAPTER 22

G
ET
to Tokyo, Brodie. They don’t kill in their own backyard.

That night I couldn’t sleep. What did Noda know? And who the hell were “they”? I considered calling the grumpy detective back, but in a previous incarnation, Noda had taught ornery to mules. He wouldn’t budge until I arrived in the Japanese capital. More telling, though, was his tone. Underneath the chief detective’s professional calm, I discerned fear. Not for himself, but for me. Noda was as solid as they come. If he insisted I raise my guard, it would be unwise to ignore him.

But why?

Don’t play hero. Most people never see them coming.

What kind of people couldn’t you see? The story about the fleet-footed tail had triggered his warning, so at the very least we were talking about people who possessed the ability to vanish down dead-end alleys. And people who could murder a whole family without leaving behind the slightest trace—except an obscure calling card no one could read.

A shapeless anxiety enveloped me. How much danger was I in? Or Renna? Would any of this lead me to my wife’s killer?