A Clean Kill in Tokyo

happy to shake them out of my life.
    Miyamoto had put me in touch with Benny, who was working with people in the LDP who had problems like Miyamoto’s, problems I could solve. For a while I worked for both of them, but Miyamoto retired about ten years ago and died peacefully in his bed not long thereafter. Since then, Benny’s been my best client. I do three or four jobs a year for him and whomever in the LDP he fronts for, charging the yen equivalent of about $100k per. Sounds like a lot, I know, but there’s overhead: equipment; multiple residences; a real but perpetually money-losing consulting operation that provides me with tax records and other means of legitimacy.
    Benny. I wondered whether he knew anything about what had happened on the train. The image of the stranger rifling through the slumped Kawamura’s pockets was as distracting as a small seed caught in my teeth, and I returned to it again and again, hoping for some insight. A coincidence? Maybe the guy had been looking for identification. Not the most productive treatment for someone who is going blue from lack of oxygen, but people don’t usually act rationally under stress, and the first time you see someone dying right in front of you it is stressful. Or he could have been Kawamura’s contact, on the train for some kind of exchange. Maybe that was their arrangement—a moving exchange on a crowded train. Kawamura calls the contact from Shibuya just before boarding the train, says, “I’m in the third-to-last car, leaving the station now,” and the contact knows where to board as the train pulls into Yoyogi Station. Sure, maybe.
    Actually, the little coincidences happen frequently in my line of work. They start automatically when you become a student of human behavior—when you start following the average person as he goes about his average day, listening to his conversations, learning his habits. The smooth shapes you take for granted from a distance can look unconnected and bizarre under close scrutiny, like cloth fibers observed under a microscope.
    Some of the targets I take on are involved in subterranean dealings, and the coincidence factor is especially high. I’ve followed subjects who turned out to be under simultaneous police surveillance—one of the reasons my countersurveillance skills have to be as dead subtle as they are. Mistresses are a frequent theme, and sometimes even second families. One subject I was preparing to take out as I followed him down the subway platform surprised the hell out of me by throwing himself in front of the train, saving me the trouble. The client was delighted, and mystified at how I was able to get it to look like a suicide on a crowded train platform.
    It felt like Benny knew something, though, and that feeling made it hard to put this little coincidence aside. If I had some way of confirming he’d broken one of my three rules by putting a B-team on Kawamura, I’d find him and he would pay the price. But there was no obvious way to acquire that confirmation. I’d have to put this one aside, maybe mentally label it “pending” to make myself feel better.
    The money appeared the next day, as Benny had promised, and the next nine days were quiet.
    On the tenth day I got a call from Harry. He told me it was my friend Koichiro, he was going to be at Galerie Coupe Chou in Shinjuku on Tuesday at eight with some friends, I should come by if I had time. I told him that sounded great and would try to make it. I knew to count back five listings in the restaurants section of the Tokyo City Source yellow pages, making our meeting place Las Chicas, and to subtract five days from the date and five hours from the time.
    I like Las Chicas for meetings because almost everyone approaches it from Aoyama-dori, making the people coming from the other direction the ones to watch, and because people have to show themselves coming across a little patio before reaching the entrance. The place is surrounded by twisting alleys snaking off in a dozen different directions, offering no choke points where someone could set up and wait. I know those alleys well, as I make it my business to know the layout of any area where I spend a lot of time. I was confident anyone unwanted would have a hard time getting close to me there.
    The food and the ambience are good, too. Both the menu and the people represent a fusion of East and West: Indian
jeera
rice and Belgian chocolate; a raven-haired beauty of high-cheeked Mongolian