Hard Rain

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 that Tokyo's
    shifting populations of homeless men would assimilate and thereby
    sanitise.
    Ducking into an alley, I discharged a shot from the canister of pepper
    spray to confirm that it worked. I decided to keep it. When Murakami
    learned about Yukiko, I might want a little extra protection.
    Nineteen.
    The next afternoon I did an SDR that finished at JR Harajuku station. I
    exited and let the eternal river of hip-hop shoppers, attired in ways
    that 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 teahouses and antiques 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 my 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
    walked in tightening concentric circles until I was sure that no one
    was positioned outside. Then I made my way back to Takeshita-dori,
    where I cut across an alley that ran alongside the restaurant itself.
    I spotted him through the enormous plate-glass window 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; CEO rather than spymaster.
    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 glass is no deterrent to a sniper, or to an
    ordinary gunman; he thought like a civilian, not a spy. I watched him
    silently for a moment, imagining high native intelligence, within 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; a passionless but adequate 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 to beat 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 tables and chairs, alongside a grand piano. Only when
    I was actually standing in front of him did he raise his head from his
    reading. It took him a half-second to recognize me. When he did he
    recoiled. "What the hell!" he stammered.
    I sat across from him. He started to get up. I restrained him with a
    firm hand on his shoulder.
    "Stay seated," I said quietly. "Keep your hands where I can see them.
    I'm only here to talk. If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead
    already."
    His eyes bulged. What the hell!" he said again.
    "Calm down," I told him. "You've been looking for me. Here I am."
    He exhaled sharply and swallowed. "Sorry," he said. "I just didn't
    expect to see you like this."
    I waited.
    "All right," he said, after a moment. "The first thing I should
    mention is that this has nothing to do with William Holtzer."
    I kept waiting.
    "I mean, he didn't have many supporters. He isn't missed."
    I doubted Holtzer's own family would miss him. I waited some more.
    "So what we want, the reason we've been looking for you," he went on,
    'is, we want you to, ah, interfere with someone's activities."
    A new euphemism, I thought. So exciting.
    "Who?" I asked,