A Clean Kill in Tokyo

Latte. “I know. It happened right in front of me on the train. Hell of a thing.”
    Was he watching my face more closely than usual? “I saw the obituary in the Daily Yomiuri,” he said. “A surviving daughter placed it. The funeral was yesterday.”
    “Aren’t you a little young to be reading the obituaries, Harry?” I asked, eyeing him over the edge of the mug.
    He shrugged. “I read everything, you know that. It’s part of what you pay me for.”
    That much was true. Harry kept his finger on the pulse, and had a knack for identifying patterns in chaos.
    “What’s the second thing?”
    “During the funeral, someone broke into his apartment. I figured it might have been you, but wanted to tell you just in case.”
    I kept my face expressionless. “How did you find out about that?” I asked.
    He took a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket and slid it toward me. “I hacked the
Keisatsucho
report.” The
Keisatsucho
is Japan’s National Police Agency, the Japanese FBI.
    “Christ, Harry, what can’t you get at?”
    He waved his hand as though it was nothing. “This is just the
Sosa,
the investigative section. Their security is pathetic.”
    I felt no particular urge to tell him that I agreed with his assessment of
Sosa
security—that in fact I had been an avid reader of their files for many years.
    I unfolded the piece of paper and started to scan its contents. The first thing I noticed was the name of the person who had prepared the report: Ishikura Tatsuhiko. Tatsu. Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
    I had known Tatsu in Vietnam, where he was attached to Japan’s Public Safety and Investigative Board, one of the precursors of the
Keisatsucho
. Hobbled by the restrictions placed on its military by Article Nine of the post war constitution and unable to do more than send a few people on a “listen and learn only” basis, the government sent Tatsu to Vietnam for six months to make wiring diagrams of KGB assistance to the Vietcong. Because I spoke Japanese I was assigned to help him learn his way around.
    Tatsu was a short man with the kind of stout build that rounds out with age, and a gentle face that masked an intensity beneath—an intensity revealed by a habit of jutting his torso and head forward in a way that made it look as though he was being restrained by an invisible leash. He was frustrated in postwar, neutered Japan, and admired the warrior’s path I had taken. For my part, I was intrigued by a secret sorrow I saw in his eyes, a sorrow that, strangely, became more pronounced when he smiled and especially when he laughed. He spoke little of his family, a wife and two young daughters in Japan, but when he did his pride was evident. Years later, I learned from a mutual acquaintance that there had also been a son, the youngest, who had died in circumstances of which Tatsu would never speak, and I understood from whence that sorrowful countenance had come.
    When I came back to Japan we spent some time together, but I had distanced myself since getting involved with Miyamoto and then Benny. I hadn’t seen him since moving underground.
    Which was good, because I knew from the reports I’d hacked that Tatsu had a pet theory: the LDP had an assassin on the payroll. In the late eighties, Tatsu came to believe that too many key witnesses in corruption cases, too many financial reformers, too many young crusaders against the political status quo were dying of “natural causes.” In his assessment, there was a pattern, and he profiled the shadowy shape at the center of it as possessing skills very much like mine.
    Tatsu’s colleagues thought the shape he saw was a ghost in his imagination, and his dogged insistence on investigating a conspiracy others claimed was a mirage had done nothing to advance his career. On the other hand, that doggedness did afford him some protection from the powers he hoped to threaten, because no one wanted to lend credence to his theories by having him die suddenly of natural causes. On the contrary: I imagined many of Tatsu’s enemies hoped he would live a long and uneventful life. I also knew this attitude would change instantly if Tatsu ever got too close to the truth.
    So far he hadn’t. But I knew Tatsu. In Vietnam he had understood the fundamentals of counterintelligence at a time when even Agency higher-ups couldn’t put together a simple wiring diagram of a typical VC unit. He had developed operational leads despite his “listen and learn only”