A Lonely Resurrection

head. “No.”
    “The guy you interrogated?”
    “Nothing yet.”
    “Why did you want to see me tonight?”
    “I wanted all my resources accessible, in case there was a hot lead on Murakami.”
    “It’s personal now?” I asked.
    “It’s personal.”
    We walked in silence. “I’ll tell you one thing,” I said. “Just when I think I’m getting jaded, the CIA does something to really surprise me, like hiring a photographer to take pictures of its own case officers in case it needs to burn them. It’s refreshing.”
    “There is no photographer,” Tatsu said.
    I stopped and looked at him. “What?”
    He shrugged. “I made him up.”
    I shook my head and blinked. “There’s no Gretz?”
    “There is a Gretz, in case Kanezaki thinks to check. A small time dope dealer I once caught and let go. I had a feeling he might be useful later.”
    I didn’t know what to say. “Tell me what I’m missing, Tatsu.”
    “Not that much, really. I simply offered Kanezaki corroboration that his fears are not mere paranoia, while positioning myself as a friend.”
    “Why?”
    “I needed him to be thoroughly convinced he is indeed being set up. We don’t yet have sufficient information to really know what action to take. I want him to be comfortable calling on me. Even eager.”
    “Is he being set up, do you think?”
    He shrugged. “Who knows? Biddle’s request for the receipts seems suspicious, as does that missing cable, but I don’t pretend to understand all the CIA’s bureaucratic procedures.”
    “Why would Biddle have been taking such an inordinate interest in Kanezaki’s meetings?”
    “I don’t know. But it wasn’t to photograph them. My men observed nothing out of place at the meeting site. Certainly no one with a camera.”
    He was being awfully open with me about his duplicity. Perhaps his way of telling me he trusted me. The in-group and the out-group. Us and them.
    We started walking again. “It was lucky, then, that the kid came to me with his suspicions,” I said.
    “And that you came to me. Thank you for that.”
    We walked in silence for a moment. Then I asked, “What do you know about Crepuscular?”
    “No more than what Kanezaki has told us.”
    “The politicians the program has been underwriting—are you working with any of them? Maybe the ones the disk didn’t implicate?”
    “Some of them.”
    “What happened? You learned from the disk they weren’t in Yamaoto’s network. Then what?”
    “I warned them. Simply sharing my information on Yamaoto’s methods, and on who among them was a Yamaoto stooge, turned them into considerably wiser, and harder, targets.”
    “And you knew they were taking money from the CIA?”
    “I knew of some, not necessarily all. From my position, I can only help protect these people from Yamaoto’s practices of extortion. But Kanezaki was correct in saying that, in Japan’s system of money politics, honest politicians still need cash to compete against Yamaoto-funded candidates. And that I cannot provide.”
    We walked wordlessly for a minute. Then he said, “I admit I was surprised to learn these people would be foolish enough to sign receipts for CIA disbursements. I fault myself, for underestimating the depth of their gullibility. I should have known better. As a breed, politicians can be astonishingly stupid, even when they are not being venal. If it were otherwise, Yamaoto would have a much harder time controlling them.”
    I thought for a moment. “Forgive me for saying so, Tatsu, but isn’t this whole thing just a waste of time?”
    “Why do you say?”
    “Because even if these guys have some ideals, even if you can protect them from Yamaoto, even if they have access to some cash, you know they can’t make a difference. Politicians in Japan are just ornamentation. The bureaucrats run the show.”
    “Our system is strange, is it not,” he said. “An uncomfortable combination of domestic history and foreign intervention. The bureaucrats are certainly powerful. Functionally, they are the descendents of the samurai, with everything that lineage entails.”
    I nodded. After the Meiji restoration in 1868, the samurai became the servants of the emperor, who was himself believed to be descended from the gods. The association connoted tremendous status.
    “Then the wartime system put them in charge of the industrial economy,” he continued. “The American occupation maintained this system so America could rule through the