A Lonely Resurrection

monitoring the movements of the yakuza’s mobile phone within the network. Any time the phone got picked up by the tower covering the area around the yakuza’s health club, Harry paged me.
    Tonight, the page had come at just after eight o’clock, while I was reading in my room at the New Otani Hotel in Akasaka-Mitsuke. The club closed at eight, I knew, so if the yakuza was working out there after hours there was a good possibility he’d be alone. What I’d been waiting for.
    My workout gear was already in a bag, and I was out the door within minutes. I caught a cab a slight distance from the hotel, not wanting a doorman to hear or remember where I might be going, and five minutes later I exited at the corner of Roppongi-dori and Gaienhigashi-dori in Roppongi. I hated to use such a direct route because doing so limited my opportunities to ensure I wasn’t being followed, but I had only a little time to pull this off the way I’d planned and decided it was worth the risk.
    I had been watching the yakuza for over a month now, and knew his routines. I’d learned that he liked to vary the times of his workouts, sometimes arriving at the gym early in the morning, sometimes at night. Probably he assumed the resulting unpredictability would make him hard to get to.
    He was half right. Unpredictability is the key to being a hard target, but the concept applies to both time and place. Half measures like this guy’s will protect you from some of the people some of the time, but they won’t save you for long from someone like me.
    Strange, how people can take adequate, even strong security measures in some respects, while leaving themselves vulnerable in others. Like double-locking the front door and leaving the windows wide open.
    Sometimes the phenomenon is caused by fear. Fear not so much of the requirements, but rather of the consequences of life as a hard target. Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen. You give up friends, family, romance. You walk through the world like a ghost, detached from the living around you. If you were to die in, say, a bus accident, you’d wind up buried in an obscure municipal graveyard, just another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no mourning. It’s natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.
    Other times there’s a form of denial at work. Circuitous routes, extensive security checks, an ongoing internal dialogue consisting of
If I were trying to get to me, how would I do it?
all require a deep acceptance of the notion that there are people out there who have both the motive and the means to cut short your time on earth. This notion is innately uncomfortable for the human psyche, so much so that it produces enormous stress even for soldiers in battle. A lot of guys, the first time they come under close-range fire, they’re shocked. “Why’s he trying to kill
me
?” they’re asking themselves. “What did I ever do to him?”
    Think about it. Ever look in a closet or under the bed, when you’re alone in the house, to ensure an intruder isn’t hiding there? Now, if you really believed the Man in the Black Ski Mask was lurking in those places, would you behave the same way? Of course not. But it’s more comfortable to believe the danger only in the abstract, and to act on it only halfheartedly. That’s denial.
    Finally, and most obviously, there is laziness. Who has the time or energy to inspect the family car for improvised explosive devices before every drive? Who can afford a two-hour, roundabout route to get to a place that could have been reached directly in ten minutes? Who wants to pass up a restaurant or bar because the only seats available face the wall, not the entrance?
    Rhetorical questions, but I know how Crazy Jake would have answered.
The living,
he would have said.
And the ones who intend to go on that way.
    Which leads to an easy rationalization, one I’m sure is common to people who have taken lives the way I have.
If he’d really wanted to live,
the rationalization goes,
I wouldn’t have been able to get to him. He wouldn’t have permitted himself that weakness, the one that did him in.
    The yakuza’s weakness was his addiction to weights. Who knows what fueled it—a history of childhood bullying that made him want to appear visibly strong afterward, an attempt to overcome a feeling of inadequacy born of being naturally slighter of build