A Lonely Resurrection

Tatsu wouldn’t have harmed her, even in response to a threat, but she had no way of knowing that. Another indication of just how desperately angry she had been.
    “He saw you?” I asked.
    “Not right away. He called me this afternoon.”
    This afternoon. Right after I’d refused him, then.
    “And he said you could find me here?”
    She nodded.
    How had he managed to track me down again? Probably those damn cameras.
You can see some of them. Not all,
I remembered him saying. Sure, use the cameras to get a general fix on my location, then send men to the likely hotels in the area, if necessary, with the same photo they had fed to the cameras and the facial recognition software, to narrow things down.
    I’d been a fool to stay in Tokyo, though with the kind of warning I had to give Harry, an overseas phone call would have been less than optimal.
    What was that wily bastard up to, though? “Any thoughts on why Tatsu would agree to see you after a year of stonewalling?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “Probably my threat.”
    I doubted it. Tatsu didn’t know her as well as I did. He would have mistakenly assumed she was bluffing.
    “You really think that was all there was to it?” I asked.
    “Maybe. Maybe he had some ulterior reason for wanting us to meet. But what was I going to do, spite him by refusing to see you?”
    “I suppose not.” And Tatsu would have supposed the same. I felt a momentary wave of annoyance, bordering on hostility, toward Tatsu and his ongoing machinations.
    She sighed. “He said telling me you were dead was his doing, not yours.”
    This was supposed to get back to me. Did he think I was going to take out Murakami in gratitude, as a quid pro quo?
    “What else did he tell you?”
    “That you helped him get the disk expecting him to turn it over to the media for publication.”
    “Did he tell you why he didn’t?”
    She nodded. “Because its information was so explosive it might have brought down the Liberal Democrats and paved the way for Yamaoto’s ascension.”
    “Sounds like you’re pretty up to date, then.”
    “I’m a long way from up to date.”
    “What about Harry?” I asked after a moment. “Why didn’t you go to him?”
    She looked away and said, “I did. I wrote him a letter. He said he’d heard you were dead, and didn’t know any more than that.”
    The way she had looked away. . . there was something she wasn’t telling me.
    “You believed him?”
    “Should I not have?”
    Good recovery. But there was something more there, I thought.
    “Remember the last time I saw you?” she asked.
    It had been here, at the Imperial Hotel. We’d spent the night together. The next morning I had left to intercept Holtzer’s limousine. I had spent a few days in police custody after that. Meanwhile, Tatsu had told Midori I was dead and had deep-sixed the disk. Game over.
    “I remember,” I said.
    “You said, ‘I’ll be back sometime in the evening. Will you wait for me?’ Well, I waited for two days before I heard from your friend Ishikura-san. I had no one to contact, no way to know.”
    Her eyes moved to the ceiling for a moment, maybe looking away from memories she didn’t want to see. Maybe willing back tears.
    “I couldn’t believe you were gone,” she went on. “Then I started to wonder if you really were gone. And if you weren’t gone, what would that mean? And then I doubted myself. I doubted myself. I thought, ‘He can’t still be alive, he wouldn’t have done this to you.’ But I couldn’t get rid of the suspicions. I didn’t know whether to grieve for you, or to want to kill you.”
    She turned and looked at me. “Do you understand what you put me through?” she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper. “You. . . you fucking tortured me!”
    In my peripheral vision, I saw her quickly flick her thumb across one cheek, then the other. I looked down into my glass. The last thing she would want would be my witnessing her tears.
    After a moment I turned to her. “Midori,” I said. My voice was low and sounded strange to me. “I’m sorrier for all this than I can say. If I could change any of it, I would.”
    We were silent for a moment. I thought of Rio and said, “For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying to get out.”
    She looked at me. “How hard are you trying? Most people get along pretty well without killing someone. They don’t have to go out of their way to avoid it.”
    “It’s a little more complicated than that with