A Lonely Resurrection

in the lobbies of higher-end hotels, to which the nearby lazy can be counted on to repair for their “private” conversations.
    “You’re still in Tokyo,” he said. “Calling from a Minami-Aoyama payphone.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I’ve got things rigged so that I can see the originating number and location of calls that come in to my apartment. It’s what 911 uses in the States. You can’t block it.”
    Harry,
I thought, smiling. Despite his SuperNerd clothes and constant case of bedhead, despite being at heart an oversized kid for whom hacking was just a video game, only better, Harry could be dangerous. The random favor I’d done him so many years earlier, when I’d saved his ass from a bunch of drunken Marines who were looking for a suitable Japanese victim, had paid a hell of a dividend.
    And yet, despite my efforts, he could also be astonishingly naïve. I would never tell anyone the kind of thing he had just told me. You don’t give away an advantage like that.
    “The NSA should never have let you go, Harry,” I told him. “You’re a privacy nut’s worst nightmare.”
    He laughed, but a little uncertainly. Harry has a hard time knowing when I’m teasing. “Their loss,” he said. “They had too many rules, anyway. It’s more fun working for a big five consulting firm. They’ve got so many other problems, they don’t even bother trying to monitor what I’m up to anymore.”
    That was smart of them. They couldn’t have kept up with him, anyway. “What’s going on?” I asked.
    “Nothing really. Just wanted to catch up with you while I could. I had a feeling that, if your business here was done, you might leave soon.”
    “I guess you were right.”
    “Is it. . . done?”
    Harry has long since figured out what I do, though he also understands it would be taboo to actually ask. And he must have known what it meant when he had contacted me earlier that evening, at my specific request, to tell me precisely where and when I could find the yakuza. Regardless, he’d be reading about it in the papers soon enough.
    “It’s done,” I told him.
    “Does that mean you won’t be around much longer?”
    I smiled, absurdly touched by his hangdog tone. “Not much longer, no. I was going to call you before I left.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah.” I looked at my watch. “In fact, what are you doing right now?”
    “Just getting up, actually.”
    “Christ, Harry, it’s ten at night.”
    “I’ve been keeping some strange hours lately.”
    “I believe it. Tell you what. Why don’t we meet for a drink. For you, it can be breakfast.”
    “What have you got in mind?”
    “Hang on a minute.” I grabbed a copy of the Tokyo Yellow Pages from under the phone, and flipped through the restaurant section until I found the place I was looking for. Then I counted ahead five listings, per our usual code, knowing Harry would count five backward from whatever I told him. Not that anyone was listening—hell, I couldn’t imagine who could listen, if Harry didn’t want them to—but you don’t take chances. I’d taught him to always use a layered defense. To never assume.
    “How about Tip-Top, in Takamatsu-cho,” I said.
    “Sure,” he said, and I knew he understood. “Great place.”
    “I’ll see you when you get there,” I told him.
    I hung up, then pulled a handkerchief out of a pants pocket and wiped down the receiver and the buttons. Old habits die hard.
    The place I had in mind was called These Library Lounge, pronounced
tei-ze
by the locals, a small bar with the feel of a speakeasy nestled on the second floor of an unremarkable building in Nishi-Azabu. Although it inhabits the city’s geographical and psychological center, Teize is suffused by a dreamy sense of detachment, as though the bar is an island secretly pleased to find itself lost in the vast ocean of Tokyo around it. Teize has the kind of atmosphere that quickly seduces talk into murmurs and weariness into languor, peeling away the transient concerns of the day until you might find yourself listening to a poignant Johnny Hodges number like “Just a Memory” the way you listened to it the first time, without filters or preconceptions or the notion that it was something you already knew; or taking a saltwater and iodine sip of one of the Islay malts and realizing that this, this exactly, is the taste for which the distiller must have mouthed a silent prayer as he committed the amber liquid to an oak cask thirty years