A Lonely Resurrection

said to Naomi about subornment, about what Midori had said about atonement. But other than a detached observation about the relative ease of the maneuver because of the lighter muscle mass, I felt nothing.
    “Say hello to Harry,” I said. I picked up her purse to make it look like she’d been the victim of a random robbery, collected the fishing line and tape, and took the stairs to the first floor. I let myself out through the front entrance, keeping my head down to avoid the camera there. I ducked around the corner into the alley, where I pulled off the hat and wig, spat out the false teeth, and rubbed the ash off my face with the damp towel. I pulled off the homeless man’s clothes and the long underwear and changed into the Gap outfit, then shoved everything back into the bag. I ran a mental list of the contents of the bag to ensure I wasn’t leaving anything behind, then double-checked the ground to be sure. Everything was copacetic. I took a deep breath and strolled back out onto Aoyama-dori.
    When I was a few blocks away, I stopped under a streetlight and quickly went through her purse. There was nothing in it of interest.
    I walked down Roppongi-dori until I found an appropriate colony of homeless men. I left the bag and the purse close by them and walked on, peeling off and dropping the gloves as I did so. I would get rid of the teeth elsewhere. They had my DNA on them, and weren’t the kind of item Tokyo’s shifting populations of homeless men would assimilate and thereby sanitize.
    Ducking into an alley, I discharged a shot from the canister of pepper spray to confirm it worked. I decided to keep it. When Murakami learned about Yukiko, I might want a little extra protection.

CHAPTER 19
    T he next afternoon, I did an SDR that ended at JR Harajuku Station. I exited and let the eternal river of hip-hop shoppers, attired in ways an extraterrestrial would probably find welcoming, carry me onto Takeshita-dori, Tokyo’s teen shopping mecca. Only in Tokyo could the jam-packed bizarrerie of a byway like Takeshita-dori exist side by side with the elegant tea houses and antique shops of Brahms-no-komichi, and the stark contrast is one of the reasons Harajuku has always been one of my favorite parts of the city.
    Tatsu had assured me that Biddle employed no bodyguards, but there’s nothing like independent verification to lower the blood pressure. There were a number of points from which I might approach Jardin de Luseine, and I moved around each of them, probing, imagining where I might position watchers if I were protecting someone in the restaurant. I moved in tightening concentric circles until I was sure no one was positioned outside. Then I made my way back to Takeshita-dori, where I cut across an alley running alongside the restaurant itself.
    I spotted him through the enormous plate glass on the alley side of the building. He was sitting alone, reading a newspaper, sipping something from a china cup. The same man I had seen in the photograph, elegantly dressed in a single-breasted blue pin-striped suit, a white shirt with a spread collar, and a burgundy rep tie. Overall the impression was fastidious, but not overly so; less American, more British; less spymaster, more CEO.
    He was sitting in one of the window seats, with his profile to the alley, and that told me a lot: he was insensitive to his surroundings; he didn’t understand that ordinary glass is no deterrent to a gunman; he thought like a civilian, not a spy. I watched him silently for a moment, imagining high native intelligence, in which he would take refuge when he found himself inadequate to the demands of the real world; Ivy League schools and possibly a graduate degree, from which he would have learned much about office corridors and nothing of the street; an adequate but passionless marriage to a woman who had borne him the required two or three children while dutifully following him from post to career-building post, hiding her growing sense of loss and inchoate desperation behind cocktail party smiles and repairing with increasing frequency to a refrigerated bottle of Chablis or Chardonnay, just a glass, and certainly no more than three, a semi-secret indulgence for beating back the long silences of listless afternoons.
    I went inside. The door opened and closed with an audible clack, but Biddle didn’t look up to check on who had entered.
    I moved across the dark wood floor, beneath the Art Deco chandeliers, around Victorian