A Lonely Resurrection

designed to convince me afterward that I had won something valuable.
    “Customs Authority records,” he said finally.
    I wasn’t particularly surprised. I had known there was some risk that Tatsu would learn of Holtzer’s death and assume I had been behind it, that if he did so he would be able to fix my movements between the time he last saw me in Tokyo and the day Holtzer died outside of D.C., less than a week apart. But killing Holtzer had been important to me, and I had been prepared to pay a price for the indulgence. Tatsu was simply presenting me with the bill.
    I was silent, and after a moment he continued. “An individual traveling under the name and passport of Fujiwara Junichi left Tokyo for San Francisco last October thirtieth. There is no record of his having returned to Japan. The logical assumption is that he stayed in the United States.”
    In a sense, he did. Fujiwara Junichi is my Japanese birth name. When I learned Holtzer and the CIA had discovered where I was living in Tokyo, I knew the name was blown and no longer usable. I had traveled to the States to kill Holtzer under the Fujiwara passport and then retired it, returning to Japan under a different identity I had previously established for such a contingency. I had hoped anyone looking for me might be diverted by this false clue and conclude I had relocated to the States. Most people would have. But not Tatsu.
    “Somehow, I could not see you living in the States,” he went on. “You seemed. . . comfortable in Japan. I did not believe you were ready to leave.”
    “I suppose you might have been onto something there.”
    He shrugged. “I asked myself, if my old friend hadn’t really left Japan, but only wanted me to believe he had, what would he have done? He would have reentered the country under a new name. He would have then relocated to a new city, because he had become too well known in Tokyo.”
    He paused, and I recognized the employment of a fortuneteller’s trick, in which the party ostensibly charged with supplying information instead cleverly elicits it, probing under the guise of informing. So far, Tatsu had offered only suggestions and generalities, and I wasn’t going to fill in the blanks for him by confirming or denying any of it.
    “Perhaps he would have used the same new name to reenter the country, and then to relocate within it,” he said, after a moment.
    But I hadn’t used the same new name when I had relocated. Doing so would have presented too obvious a nexus for a determined tracker to follow. Tatsu must not have been sure of that, and, as I suspected, was hoping to learn more by getting me to react. If I were to slip and confirm that I had used the same name, he would tell me that it was by this he had managed to find me, thereby avoiding the need to reveal how he had really done it, and leaving the vulnerability intact, perhaps to be exploited again later.
    So I said nothing, effecting a slightly bored expression instead.
    He looked at me, the corners of his mouth creeping up into the barest hint of a smile. It was his way of acknowledging that I knew what he was up to, meaning it was useless for him to keep at it, and that he would now get to the point.
    “Fukuoka was too small,” he said. “Sapporo, too remote. Nagoya was too close to Tokyo. Hiroshima was possible because the atmosphere is good, but I thought the Kansai region more likely because it’s less distant from Tokyo, to which I guessed you might want to maintain some proximity. That meant Kyoto, possibly Kobe. But more likely Osaka.”
    “Because. . .”
    “Because Osaka is bigger, more bustling, so there is more room to hide. And it has a larger transient population, so a new arrival draws less attention. Also I know how you love jazz, and Osaka is known for its clubs.”
    I might have known Tatsu would key on the clubs. During the Taisho Period, from 1912 to 1926, jazz migrated from Shanghai to Kansai, the western region of Honshu, Japan’s main island, where Osaka is located. A host of dance halls and live houses were built in the Soemoncho and Dotonbori entertainment districts, and jazz took off in cafés everywhere. The legacy lives on today in establishments like Mr. Kelly’s, Overseas, Royal Horse, and, of course, the Osaka Blue Note, and I couldn’t deny that the presence of these places had been a factor in my thinking.
    I had even recognized, for the very reasons Tatsu had just articulated, that Osaka might be a