Rainfall

hurt us,” I answered. “Right now we’re running blind. If we put our heads together, we’ve got a much better chance of retrieving the disk than we do if we work separately.”

    “Please, Mr. Bulfinch,” Midori said. “I barely escaped being killed a few days ago by whoever is trying to find that disk. I need your help.”

    Bulfinch grimaced and looked at Midori and then at me, his eyes sweeping back and forth several times. “All right,” he said after a moment. “Two months ago your father contacted me. He told me he read my column for
Forbes
. He told me who he was and said he wanted to help. A classic whistle-blower.”

    Midori turned to me. “That was about the time he was diagnosed.”

    “I’m sorry?” Bulfinch asked.

    “Lung cancer. He had just learned that he had little time to live,” Midori said.

    Bulfinch nodded, understanding. “I see. I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

    Midori bowed her head briefly, accepting his solicitude. “Please, go on.”

    “Over the course of the next month I had several clandestine meetings with your father, during which he briefed me extensively on corruption in the Construction Ministry and its role as broker between the Liberal Democratic Party and the
yakuza
. These briefings provided me with invaluable insight into the nature and extent of corruption in Japanese society. But I needed corroboration.”

    “What corroboration?” I asked. “Can’t you just print it and attribute it to ‘a senior source in the Construction Ministry’?”

    “Ordinarily, yes,” Bulfinch replied. “But there were two problems here. First, Kawamura’s position in the Ministry gave him unique access to the information he was providing me. If we had published the information, we might as well have used his name in the by-line.”

    “And the second problem?” Midori asked.

    “Impact,” Bulfinch answered. “We’ve already run a half dozen exposés on the kind of corruption Kawamura was involved in. The Japanese press resolutely refuses to pick them up. Why? Because the politicians and bureaucrats pass and interpret laws that can make or break domestic corporations. And the corporations provide over half the media’s advertising revenues. So if, for example, a newspaper runs an article that offends a politician, the politician calls his contacts at the relevant corporations, who pull their advertising from the newspaper and transfer it to a rival publication, and the offending paper goes bankrupt. You see?

    “If you have a reporter investigate a story from outside the government-sponsored
kisha
news clubs, you get shut down. If you play ball, the money keeps rolling in, licit and illicit. No one here takes chances; everyone treats the truth like a contagious disease. Christ, Japan’s press is the most docile in the world.”

    “But with proof . . . ?” I asked.

    “Hard proof would change everything. The papers would be forced to cover the story or else reveal that they are nothing but tools of the government. And flushing the corrupt kingpins out into the open would weaken them and embolden the press. We could start a virtuous cycle that would lead to a change in Japanese politics the likes of which the country hasn’t seen since the Meiji restoration.”

    “I think you may be overestimating the zeal of domestic media,” Midori said.

    Bulfinch shook his head. “Not at all. I know some of these people well. They’re good reporters, they want to publish. But they’re realists, too.”

    “The proof,” I said. “What was it?”

    Bulfinch looked at me over the tops of his wireless glasses. “I don’t know exactly. Only that it’s hard evidence. Incontrovertible.”

    “It sounds like that disk should go to the Keisatsucho, not the press,” Midori said, referring to Tatsu’s investigative organization.

    “Your father wouldn’t have lasted a day if he’d handed that information over to the feds,” I said, saving Bulfinch the trouble.

    “That’s right,” Bulfinch said. “Your father wasn’t the first person to try to blow the whistle on corruption. Ever hear of Honma Tadayo?”

    Ah, yes, Honma-san. A sad story.

    Midori shook her head.

    “When Nippon Credit Bank went bankrupt in 1998,” Bulfinch went on, “at least thirty-six billion dollars, and probably much more, of its one-hundred-thirty-three-billion-dollar loan portfolio had gone bad. The bad loans were linked to the underworld, even to illegal payments to North