A Lonely Resurrection

Secret Service-style ASP tactical baton, a nasty piece of black steel that collapsed to nine inches and telescoped to twenty-six with a snap of the wrist.
    Next stop was a sporting good store, where I bought a roll of thirty-pound-test high-impact monofilament fishing line, white sports tape, gloves, a wool hat, long underwear, and a canvas bag. Third stop, a drug store for some cheap cologne, a hand towel, and a pack of cigarettes and matches. Next, a local Gap for an unobtrusive change of clothes. Then a novelty shop for a fright wig and a set of rotted false teeth. Finally, a packaging supply house, for a twenty-five-meter roll of translucent packing tape.
Shinjuku,
I thought, like an advertising jingle.
For All Your Shopping Needs.
    I holed up in another business hotel, this time in Ueno. I set my watch alarm for midnight and went to sleep.
    When the alarm woke me, I slipped the long underwear on under my clothes and secured the baton to my wrist with two lengths of the sports tape. I wet the towel and wrung it out, put it and other gear I had bought into the canvas bag, and walked out to the station, where I found a payphone. I still had the card I had taken on my first night at Damask Rose. I called the phone number on it.
    A man answered the phone. It might have been Mr. Ruddy, but I wasn’t sure.
    “Hai,
Damask Rose,” the voice said. I heard J-Pop playing in the background and imagined dancers on the twin stages.
    “Hello,” I said, in Japanese, raising my voice slightly to disguise it. “Can you tell me who’s there tonight?”
    The voice intoned a half-dozen names. Naomi was among them. So was Yukiko.
    “Great,” I said. “Are they all there until three?”
    “Hai, sou desu.”
Yes, they are.
    “Great,” I said again. “I’ll see you later.”
    I hung up.
    I caught a cab to Shibuya, then did a foot SDR to Minami-Aoyama. I remembered Yukiko’s address from the time I had checked her and Naomi’s backgrounds from Osaka, and I had no trouble finding her apartment building. The main entrance was in front. An underground garage was off to one side, accessible only by a grated metal door controlled by a magnetic card reader in a center island. No other ways in or out.
    I thought of her white M3. Assuming the night I had seen her in it wasn’t an anomaly, it was her commuting vehicle. She wouldn’t be driving it to Harry’s tonight, and Murakami would either be unreachable for the moment or he would have told her to stay away. I judged there was an excellent possibility that she would be pulling in sometime after three.
    I found a nearby building separated from its neighbor by a long, narrow alley. I moved into the shadows there and opened my bag of goodies. I took out the cologne and applied a heavy dose to my nostrils. Then I closed the bag and stashed it, and walked into nearby Roppongi.
    It didn’t take me long to find a homeless man who looked about the right size. He was sitting on a cinderblock in the shadows of one of the elevated expressways of Roppongi-dori, next to a cardboard and tarp shelter. He was wearing overlarge brown pants cinched tight with a worn belt, a filthy checked button-down shirt, and a fraying cardigan sweater that two generations earlier might have been red.
    I walked over to him.
“Fuku o kokan shite kurenai ka?”
I asked, pointing to my chest. You want to trade clothes?
    He looked at me for a long moment as though I was unhinged.
“Nandatte?”
he asked. What the hell are you talking about?
    “I’m serious,” I said in Japanese. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
    I shrugged off the nylon windbreaker I was wearing and handed it to him. He took it, his expression briefly incredulous, then wordlessly began to slip out of his rags.
    Two minutes later I was wearing his clothes. Even through the heavy layer of cologne, the smell was horrific. I thanked him and headed back to Aoyama.
    Back in the alley, I pulled on the fright wig and secured it with the wool hat, then popped in the false teeth. I lit a cigarette and let it burn down, then rubbed a mixture of ashes and spit onto my face. I lit a match and took a quick look at myself in a sawed-off dental mirror I keep on my keychain. I barely recognized what I saw, and I smiled a rotten-toothed smile.
    I slipped on the gloves and walked out to the garage entrance of Yukiko’s building. I took the fishing line and translucent tape, but left the bag and the rest of its contents in the alley. There