Rainfall

off, certainly nothing out of the ordinary. She might ask Mama about me at some point, but all Mama knows is that I pop into Alfie from time to time without warning.

    I wondered what it would have been like if we’d met under other circumstances.
It could have been good
, I thought again.

    I almost laughed at the absurdity. There was no room for anything like that in my life, and I knew it.

    Crazy Jake again:
There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done
.

    That was about the truest advice I’d ever been given.
Forget about her
, I thought.
You know you have to
.

    My pager buzzed. I found a pay phone and dialed the number.

    It was Benny. After the usual exchange of bona fides, he said, “There’s another job for you, if you want it.”

    “Why are you contacting me this way?” I asked, meaning why not the bulletin board.

    “Time-sensitive matter. You interested?”

    “I’m not known for turning away work.”

    “You’d have to bend one of your rules on this one. If you do, there’s a bonus.”

    “I’m listening.”

    “We’re talking about a woman. Jazz musician.”

    Long pause.

    “You there?” he said.

    “Still listening.”

    “You want the details, you know where to find them.”

    “What’s the name?”

    “Not over the phone.”

    Another pause.

    He cleared his throat. “All right. Same name as a recent job. Related matter. Is that important?”

    “Not really.”

    “You want this?”

    “Probably not.”

    “Significant bonus if you want it.”

    “What’s significant?”

    “You know where to find the details.”

    “I’ll take a look.”

    “I need an answer within forty-eight hours, okay? This needs to be taken care of.”

    “Don’t they all,” I said, and hung up.

    I stood there for a moment afterwards, looking around the station, watching people bustling back and forth.

    Fucking Benny, telling me, “This needs to be taken care of,” letting me know that someone else would be doing it if I didn’t.

    Why Midori? A connection with Bulfinch, the reporter. He had sought her out, I saw that at Alfie, along with Telephone Man. So whoever Telephone Man worked for would assume that Midori had learned something she wasn’t supposed to, or maybe that her father had given her something, something Bulfinch was after. Something not worth taking any chances over.

    You could do it,
I thought.
If you don’t, someone else will. You’d at least do it right, do it fast. She wouldn’t feel anything.

    But they were just words. I wanted to feel that way but couldn’t. What I felt like instead was that her world should never have collided with mine.

    A Mita-sen train pulled in, heading in the direction of Otemachi, the transfer point to Omotesando and the Blue Note.
An omen
, I thought, and got on it.

10

    IF YOU WANT to survive as long as I have in the world I inhabit, you’ve got to think like the opposition. I learned that from the gangs that pursued me when I was a kid, and refined the lesson with SOG in Cambodia. You’ve got to ask: If I were trying to get at me, how would I go about it?

    Predictability is the key, geographical and chronological. You need to know where a person will be and at what time. You learn this by surveillance, analyzing the routes to work, the times the target comes and goes, until you’ve identified a pattern, and choke points through which the target can almost always be counted on to pass at a certain time. You choose the most vulnerable of these, and that’s where you lay the ambush.

    And if that’s what you’re doing, you’d better not forget that all the time someone is running the same kind of operation on you. Thinking like this is what divides the hard targets from the soft ones.

    The same principle works for crime prevention. If you wanted to grab some quick cash, where would you wait? Near an ATM, probably, and probably at night. You’d scout around for the right location, too, someplace with enough pedestrian traffic to save you a long wait, but not so much of a crowd that you’d be impeded from acting when you identified a good target. You’d look for a dark spot far enough from the machine so the target wouldn’t notice you, but close enough so that you could move right in once the cash transaction was completed. Police stations close by would make you nervous, and you’d probably hunt for a better place. Etc. If you think this way, you’ll know exactly where to look to spot someone lurking,