A Clean Kill in Tokyo

a jazz pianist, and the whole time you’ve never once suggested you want to go to the police.”
    She didn’t answer.
    “Do you want to? You can, you know.”
    She sat facing me, her nostrils flaring slightly, her fingers drumming along the edge of the bed.
Goddamn it,
I thought,
what does she know that she hasn’t been telling?
    “Tell me about your father, Midori. I can’t help you if you don’t.”
    She leaped off the bed and faced me squarely. “Tell you?” she spat. “No, you tell me! Tell me who the fuck you are, or I swear I will go to the police and I don’t care what happens after that!”
    Progress, of a sort.
“What do you want to know?”
    “Everything!”
    “Okay.”
    “Starting with who were those men in my apartment?”
    “I don’t know who they are.”
    “But you knew they were there?”
    She was going to pull hard at that loose thread until the entire fabric unraveled. I didn’t know how to get around it. “Yes.”
    “How?”
    “Because your apartment is bugged.”
    “Because my apartment is bugged… are you with those men?”
    “No.”
    “Would you please stop giving me one-word answers? Okay, my apartment is bugged, by who, by you?”
    There it was. “Yes.”
    She looked at me for a long beat, then sat back down on the bed. “Who do you work for?” she asked, her voice flat.
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    Another long beat, and the same flat tone: “Then tell me what you want.”
    I looked at her, wanting her to see my eyes. “I want to make sure you don’t get hurt.”
    Her face was expressionless. “And you’re going to do that by…”
    “These people are coming after you because they think you have something that could harm them. I don’t know what. But as long as they think you have it, you’re not going to be safe.”
    “But if I were to just give whatever it is to you…”
    “Without knowing what the thing is, I don’t even know if giving it to me would help. I told you, I’m not here for whatever it is. I’m here for you.”
    “Can’t you see what this looks like from my perspective? ‘Just hand it over so I can help you.’”
    “I understand that.”
    “I’m not sure you do.”
    “Doesn’t matter. Tell me about your father.”
    There was a long pause. I knew what she was going to say, and she said it: “This is why you were asking all those questions before. You came to Alfie, and, God, everything… you’ve just been using me from the beginning.”
    “Some of what you’re saying is true. Not all of it. Now tell me about your father.”
    “No.”
    I felt a flush of anger in my neck.
Easy, John.
“The reporter was asking, too, wasn’t he? Bulfinch? What did you tell him?”
    She looked at me, trying to gauge just how much I knew. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    I looked at the door and thought,
Walk away. Just walk away.
    But instead: “Listen to me, Midori. All I have to do is walk out that door. You’re the one who won’t be able to sleep in her own apartment, who’s afraid to go to the police, who can’t go back to her life. So you figure out a way to work with me on this, or you can damn well figure it all out on your own.”
    Half a minute passed. Then she said, “Bulfinch told me my father was supposed to deliver something to him on the morning he died, but that Bulfinch never got it. He wanted to know if I had it, or if I knew where it was.”
    “What was it?”
    “A computer disk. That’s all he would tell me. He told me if he said more it would put me in danger.”
    “He had already compromised you just by talking to you. He was being followed outside of Alfie.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “Do you know anything about this disk?”
    “No.”
    I looked at her, trying to judge. “I don’t think I have to tell you, the people who want it aren’t particularly restrained about their methods.”
    “I understand that.”
    “Okay, let’s put together what we have. Everyone thinks your father told you something, or gave you something. Did he? Did he tell you anything, or give you some documents, maybe, anything he said was important?”
    “No. Nothing I remember.”
    “Try. A safe-deposit key? A locker key? Did he tell you he had hidden something, or that he had important papers somewhere? Anything like that?”
    “No,” she said, after a moment. “Nothing.”
    She might be holding back, I knew. She certainly had reason not to trust me.
    “But you know something,” I said.